Hi there, I’m David Gilardi, a nerd, sci-fi, fantasy enthusiast who would like nothing more than to get on the Starship Enterprise (or anything remotely like it that won’t explode on its first voyage) and explore the universe. Until that happens I’ll continue playing games, building distributed database clusters, climbing up multi-story strips of fabric while calling it “art”, and “improving” every bit of my house that I can.

You mentioned distributed databases

Yuppers. I’m currently a Technical Evangelist at DataStax and let me tell you after 20+ years in my career coding, DBAing, building bare metal and cloud infrastructure, and managing I am a happy camper getting back into some seriously cool tech. I have a mixed-workload search/graph/Cassandra cluster using 4 Raspberry PI’s for my core Cassandra DC. You can’t get much more commodity hardware than PI’s and my cluster is humming along quite nicely.

Strips of fabric?

Yes! One of my favorite activities is aerial arts. Seriously, drop the gym, start climbing stuff and your body will thank you. It also might reward you with some torn, ripped, pulled tendons, ligaments, and muscles, but no matter. It’s all earned pain. I realize I don’t make it sound all that great, but after 5 years I’m still in one piece and love every moment of it (most of the time).

Here is a fun example. Sorry for the potato quality, it won’t happen again. Turn up the sound and wait for the end.