Tom Santero is Director of Evangelism at Basho Technologies, creators of the Riak distributed database, where for the past two years he has consulted with hundreds of engineers at dozens of companies advocating distributed systems and Riak best practices. Tom is an active member of the distributed systems and functional programming communities; organizes the NYC Erlang user group, the RICON distributed systems conference series and <3's Python. Tom lives in Brooklyn, has two adorable cats and likes good beer.