Holden Karau

Holden Karau is transgender Canadian, and anactive open source contributor. When not in San Francisco working as asoftware development engineer at IBM's Spark Technology Center, Holdentalks internationally on Spark and holds office hours at coffeeshops athome and abroad. She makes frequent contributions to Spark, specializing inPySpark and Machine Learning. Prior to IBM she worked on a variety ofdistributed, search, and classification problems at Alpine, Databricks, Google, Foursquare, and Amazon. She graduated from the University ofWaterloo with a Bachelor of Mathematics in Computer Science. Outside ofsoftware she enjoys playing with fire, welding, scooters, poutine, anddancing.