As CTO at Skipjaq, Rob leads a team working on the cutting edge of machine-driven performance optimisation. When he's not thinking about how best to tune the myriad workloads encountered by Skipjaq customers, he's thinking hard about how to pass the optimisation burden on to machines that learn. Rob is well known as a co-founder of SpringSource, the software company behind the wildly-successful Spring Framework. At SpringSource he was a core contributor to the Spring Framework and led the team that built dm Server (now Eclipse Virgo). Prior to SpringSource, Rob was (at the age of 19) co-founder and CTO at Cake Solutions, a boutique consultancy in Manchester, UK. A respected author, speaker and teacher, Rob writes and talks frequently about large-scale systems, cloud architecture and functional programming. His published works include the highly-popular Spring Framework reference "Pro Spring".