Shook graduated with a B.S. in Computer Science from the University of Maryland Baltimore County (UMBC) and took a job building a new high-performance graphics engine for a game studio. Seeking new challenges, he enrolled in the graduate program at UMBC with a focus on distributed computing technologies. He quickly found development work as a U.S. government contractor on a large-scale Hadoop deployment. Shook is involved in developing and instructing training curriculum for both Hadoop and Pig. He spends what little free time he has working on side projects and playing video games.