Abbas Ahmed, a Couchbase Community Champion based in Manchester, U.K., balances his professional role at Rentalcars.com with family life and a passion for electronics and public speaking. With a background in computing and a career that began in academia, Ahmed has experience with various databases, ultimately favoring MySQL early in his career and later Couchbase for its caching capabilities and ease of management. At Rentalcars.com, he focuses on planning and executing projects involving database layers and microservices, while also promoting a DevOps culture to automate recurring tasks. Couchbase was chosen for its efficient caching and JSON document database solutions, which have significantly improved user experience and operational efficiency at Rentalcars.com. Ahmed appreciates Couchbase's rack awareness feature for data security and expresses a desire for enhancements such as partial updates on XDCR and additional monitoring tools. In his personal reading, he values books like "Next Generation Databases" by Guy Harrison for their clear and educational presentation of concepts.