Arun C Murthy
I've been in love with programming since early schoolboy days and can't think of anything better to do. I really enjoy the process of going from a blank-slate to a full-fleged system which accomplishes tangible, useful stuff.
I'm currently working on Apache Hadoop, a software framework for running applications on large clusters built of commodity hardware. Hadoop provides a distributed file-system and a parallel processing framework based on the Map-Reduce programming paradigm. I'm very proud of what we have accomplished so far with Hadoop and excited about where we can still go. It is very cool to see it running on a couple of thousand nodes crunching terabytes, given where it was in early 2006. I've also, recently, dabbled with Apache Pig, a platform for analyzing large data-sets. Pig consists of an SQL-like query language called Pig Latin which is compiled into Hadoop Map-Reduce programs and executed on very large clusters.
I'm based out of Sunnyvale, California, and have been working at Yahoo! since graduating with a degree in Computer Science in June, 2003 - rubbing shoulders with some seriously bright sparks and having fun while at it. I've so far got my hands dirty working on mission-critical projects (my first project at Yahoo! Finance was to overhaul our entire stock-quotes feeds infrastructure), performance-intensive tools (rewrite of apc for php5), core systems programming (both user-land and kernel-space), public-facing online destinations and large-scale distributed systems.
I enjoy being around smart people, challenging myself and learning from them. I also like teaching and have done that at college and continue to run various training programs at work.
In other news, I play and watch a wide variety of sports. I'm actually half-decent at a few of them (football i.e. soccer, chess) and atrocious at some (golf). I love running and have a half-marathon in my credits section. My weekends are spent playing badminton, football and being plonked in front of T.V. watching the English/Spanish/Champions League, Formula1 and so on. Incredibly the watching bit is something that lands me into trouble with my wife often... can you imagine that?!