Let’s look at it together.
Bring us whatever you’re wrestling with. A new architecture, a migration plan, a bill that keeps growing, a team that needs a sounding board. Thirty minutes, no pitch. We’ll tell you what we see.
The fastest path
Book a 30-minute introduction call.
Pick a slot that works. No deck, no pitch. We’ll talk about what’s in front of you and tell you whether and how we can help.
Write to us
hello@mcfad.inWhat to include
- Your name, role, and company.
- One paragraph on the problem. What’s broken, what you’ve tried, what the deadline is.
- The kind of engagement you think you want: fractional, advisory, architecture review, tiger team, or “we don’t know, that’s why we’re asking.”
- Rough timeline and a budget band.
Writing the first message
Short and concrete works best. “We’re moving off Oracle and we think we want Cassandra but our team has never run it” is a great place to start, so we can come into the call with something useful already written down.
If you know the pain but not the shape, send that too. “Something is wrong with our data spend and we can’t name it yet” works just as well. We’d rather help you find the right question than wait for you to polish a brief.
If we’re not the right fit
The data and AI infrastructure community is small, and we know most of the people doing good work in it. If your problem isn’t the right shape for us (different domain, smaller scope, our calendar is full, or you need something we don’t do), say so on the first call and we’ll usually know someone who is. We’ve been pointing colleagues at each other for twenty years.
If your team is early days with Cassandra or cloud-native data, a lot of what we know is already public: the O’Reilly book, the conference talks, and the Apache mailing lists. Start there. Write back when you have a more specific question. There’s no clock running.
Response time
We reply to every inquiry within two business days. If you don’t hear back inside a week, the message went to spam. Try LinkedIn.
Other ways to reach us
- linkedin.com/in/patrickmcfadin. Open DMs, we read them.
- Open source
- Patrick is a PMC member on Apache Cassandra. The dev list, the ASF Slack, and GitHub are all good places to find us on technical questions.
- Conferences
- We give several talks a year at KubeCon, ApacheCon, the Cassandra Summit, and DataStax events. Come say hi if we’re at the same one. Half our engagements start that way.