In the past, Shook has engineered several mission-critical Hadoop applications in the U.S. Intelligence Community. He has developed and taught training courses for working professionals new to Hadoop and Pig. Shook is also an author of O'Reilly Media's "MapReduce Design Patterns", a book to help beginners and experts alike solve complex problems using MapReduce. He graduated from the University of Maryland Baltimore County in 2009 with a B.S. in Computer Science, and once again in 2013 with a Master's degree focusing on in-memory distributed systems. He occasionally teaches CS courses at UMBC.