Rob Reid, a London native and software developer, has become a prominent figure in the Cockroach Labs community. He started his career as a customer of the company's distributed SQL database, CockroachDB, in 2016, and quickly fell in love with its ease of use and power. After writing his first book on CockroachDB, "The Practical Guide to CockroachDB: Building Fault-Tolerant Distributed Systems," Reid was hired by the company as a technical evangelist. He has since become one of the faces of Cockroach Labs, creating content for the company's YouTube channel and leading events like RoachFest London. The new edition of Reid's book, "CockroachDB: The Definitive Guide, 2nd Edition," is now available, featuring updates on new features such as vectors, super regions, and logical data replication. Reid shares his passion for CockroachDB with developers, architects, operators, DBAs, and anyone looking to build applications with an elastic, distributed SQL database built for the cloud. He emphasizes the importance of thinking bigger than current limitations and getting hands-on experience with the product. With its high availability, low latency, and scalability, CockroachDB has become a leading database company, powering business-critical use-cases at enterprises across various industries.