About the Author

Alberto Paro is an engineer, project manager, and software developer. He currently works as a CTO at Big Data Technologies and as a freelance consultant on software engineering for Big Data and NoSQL solutions. He loves to study emerging solutions and applications mainly related to Big Data processing, NoSQL, natural language processing, and neural networks. He began programming in BASIC on a Sinclair Spectrum when he was 8 years old, and to date, has collected a lot of experience using different operating systems, applications, and programming.

In 2000, he graduated in computer science engineering at Politecnico di Milano with a thesis on designing multiuser and multidevice web applications. He assisted professors at the university for about a year. He then came in contact with The Net Planet Company and loved their innovative ideas; he started working on knowledge management solutions and advanced data mining products. In summer 2014, his company was acquired by a Big Data technologies company, where he currently works mainly using Scala and Python on state-of-the-art big data software (Spark, Akka, Cassandra, and YARN). In 2013, he started freelancing as a consultant for Big Data, machine learning, and ElasticSearch.

In his spare time, when he is not playing with his children, he likes to work on open source projects. When he was in high school, he started contributing to projects related to the GNOME environment (gtkmm). One of his preferred programming languages is Python, and he wrote one of the first NoSQL backends on Django for MongoDB (Django-MongoDB-engine). In 2010, he began using ElasticSearch to provide search capabilities to some Django e-commerce sites and developed PyES (a Pythonic client for ElasticSearch), as well as the initial part of the ElasticSearch MongoDB river. He is the author of ElasticSearch Cookbook as well as a technical reviewer Elasticsearch Server, Second Edition, and the video course, Building a Search Server with ElasticSearch, all of which are published by Packt Publishing.