Slava Akhmechet is the founder of RethinkDB, a database company dedicated to helping developers build realtime web applications. Prior to RethinkDB he was a systems engineer in the financial industry, working on scaling custom database systems. Slava is a frequent speaker and a blogger. He blogs about his interests in open source, developer tools, building delightful user experiences, and distributed systems on defmacro.org. He is currently on leave from a Ph.D. program in Computational Neuroscience at Stony Brook University.