(I realize I probably shouldn't respond to this question, which would have been satisfied by simply reading the link. But it gave me an excuse to post this talk.)
"I open-sourced Cascalog, ElephantDB, and Storm, started writing a book, gave a lot of talks, and in July of 2011 experienced the thrill of being acquired. My projects spread beyond BackType and Twitter to be relied on by dozens and dozens of companies."
He's pretty well known on HN. "Hacker-News-famous", you could say.
