Tom White is an independent software engineer. His long-term professional interest centres around large-scale distributed storage and processing. He has been a software engineer for over 20 years, and for the last decade has worked in distributed systems, as a developer, committer and mentor on numerous projects in the Apache Hadoop big data ecosystem. Tom wrote “Hadoop: the Definitive Guide” published by O’Reilly. For the last six years he has focused entirely on big data infrastructure for scientists, including GATK, Scanpy, sgkit, and most recently Cubed. He lives in the Brecon Beacons in Wales with his family.