Adam Shook is a Technical Architect at Pivotal, working to help customers solve their big data problems using a number of Greenplum and Hadoop-related technologies. In the past, Shook has engineered several mission-critical Hadoop applications in the U.S. Intelligence Community. He has developed and taught training courses for students new to Hadoop and Pig. Shook is also an author of O'Reilly Media's "MapReduce Design Patterns", a book to help beginners and experts alike solve complex problems using MapReduce. He graduated with a B.S. in Computer Science from the University of Maryland Baltimore County (UMBC) and is currently completing his Master's degree at UMBC, focusing on in-memory distributed systems.