During his tenure at Couchbase, he wrote the initial version of the Couchbase Hadoop Plugin, was the lead maintainer of the Couchbase Java SDK, worked on the Couchbase persistence, replication, and caching tiers, and led the design and implementation of the Database Change Protocol (DCP), which is used for data replication, indexing, cross datacenter replication, and many other components. He is currently working to improve Couchbase's developer and operational tools. Michael graduated from the University of California, Santa Barbara with a bachelor’s degree in computer science, with an emphasis in computer networking and distributed systems.