Introducing Patrick McFadin

Patrick McFadin is the vice president of developer relations at DataStax and is devoted to making users of DataStax and Apache Cassandra as successful as possible and improving their experience as developers. Previously, he served as a chief evangelist for Apache Cassandra and was one of the leading experts in Apache Cassandra and data modeling techniques. Patrick has been fortunate enough to help with building some of the largest deployments in the world and he publicly speaks about the design of highly available distributed systems. Find Patrick on Twitter: @PatrickMcFadin.

Geertjan Wielenga: Would it be true to say that this whole profession is fairly new?

Patrick McFadin: As a job description, it's fairly new. If you go back to the early days of software, Apple employed evangelists in the '80s to help to build its developer ecosystem. That was a formal job, but it was more of an engineering advocacy role at the time.

If you look at...