Patrick's route to developer advocacy

Patrick McFadin: This career is not what I was originally planning. I have a degree in computer engineering and distributed computing. I'm classically trained as an engineer. I worked in the dot-com industry in the '90s and had a lot of fun. I made good money, but when the dot-com boom ended in the '00s, I got involved in large-scale infrastructure. I loved it.

I had my own consulting company for a long time until I sold that to another company. I ran an infrastructure team and in 2011, I started using Cassandra quite a bit for problems that I was having. I thought, "This is a really great database that no one knows about."

A friend of mine started a company called Riptano, which eventually changed its name to DataStax. He kept trying to get me to join the team. Finally, I acquiesced. I was about employee number 50. When you're in a small start-up, everybody has about 10 unofficial jobs.

I was...