Matt has been a Cassandra user and occasional contributor since version 0.7 and is a co-organizer of the Cassandra meetup in the Washinton DC area. At the European Cassandra Summit in October of 2013, he was recognized by DataStax as a Cassandra MVP. Matt has been working with distributed systems his entire career and kinda wishes he was one. Because while Cassandra is partition tolerant, Matt is not.