VII · Modern builders

Doug Cutting

1963–

Cloudera (chief architect) · ex-Yahoo · co-creator of Hadoop · Lucene · Nutch

Gave us

Lucene (1999, search). Nutch (2002, web crawler). Hadoop (2006, with Mike Cafarella) — an open-source clone of Google's GFS + MapReduce papers that powered a decade of "big data" infrastructure.

The story

Read Google's 2003 GFS paper and the 2004 MapReduce paper, then proceeded to spend the next two years implementing them in his garage office, named the project after his son's stuffed elephant. The name has outlasted the technology.

One more thing

The elephant is real. Was named Hadoop. Is presumably still around somewhere.

More from Modern builders

Solomon Hykes Co-founder of Docker · now Dagger · ex-dotCloud Joe Beda · Brendan Burns · Craig McLuckie Co-creators of Kubernetes at Google · Heptio · VMware · Microsoft Salvatore Sanfilippo (antirez) Independent · Redis Ltd. (until 2020) · now back to Redis Jeff Dean · Sanjay Ghemawat Google senior fellows · co-authors of MapReduce, Bigtable, Spanner, TPU Ryan Dahl Creator of Node.js · creator of Deno · independent Moxie Marlinspike Founder of Signal · cryptographer · former sailor Geoffrey Hinton · Yann LeCun · Yoshua Bengio 2018 Turing laureates · the deep-learning trio

Across the field

I Edsger W. Dijkstra Computer scientist · TU Eindhoven · UT Austin I Donald Knuth Stanford emeritus · author of The Art of Computer Programming I Leslie Lamport Microsoft Research · ex-DEC SRC · 2013 Turing laureate II Dennis Ritchie Bell Labs · co-creator of C and Unix II Ken Thompson Bell Labs · Google · co-creator of Unix · co-creator of Go II Bjarne Stroustrup Morgan Stanley · ex-Bell Labs · creator of C++ II Guido van Rossum Microsoft · ex-Dropbox · ex-Google · creator of Python II Anders Hejlsberg Microsoft technical fellow · creator of Turbo Pascal, Delphi, C#, TypeScript

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