Emil Eifrém, Founder of Neo4j

After some unsuccessful attempts at demo programming in the 80s, Emil Eifrem found a hacker's home in the world of text role-playing games in the early days of the internet.

100 000 lines of spaghetti C, almost as many segfaults and several sleepless years later, he escaped into the warm embrace of Java 1.0a2 and has stayed there ever since. (He has no regrets but is secretly proud that the text game he founded is still played almost 15 years later.

After a decade as a developer, mentor and architect at a consulting- and product company in southern Sweden, Emil's current focus is on evangelizing graph databases and preaching the demise of tabular solutions everywhere.