Adam Retter
Professor at Markup UK
London, England, United Kingdom
Summary
🤩
RockstarAdam Retter is a professor and seasoned software engineer with over 21 years of experience specialising in database storage internals, NoSQL and native XML databases. He leads Evolved Binary, the developer of FusionDB, and is a long-time core developer of the eXist-db project, blending deep systems-level expertise with practical product delivery. Adam has a proven track record delivering large-scale digital preservation systems—most notably designing The National Archives’ DRI—and inventing standards such as RESTXQ and the CSV Schema language. His open-source contributions span high-profile projects like RocksDB and Apache Commons Codec, reflecting a focus on robust internals, testing and API stability. Equally comfortable in the lecture theatre and the server room, he combines academic teaching and standards work with hands-on engineering and consultancy. Based in London, he routinely bridges domain experts and engineering teams to turn complex preservation and data challenges into production systems.
21 years of coding experience
13 years of employment as a software developer
English, Italian
Stackoverflow
3,925reputation
257kreached
210answers
38questions
xml
top-5%
xpath
top-5%
Github Skills (41)
apache-commons10
c-language10
commons10
key-value-store10
gitlab-api10
apidoc10
testing10
refactor10
java10
javas10
installer10
api10
codec10
file-handling10
error-handling10
Programming languages (29)
Github contributions (5)
eXist-db/exist
May 2005 - Jan 2023
eXist Native XML Database and Application Platform
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:40 releases, 629 reviews, 6809 commits in 17 years 11 months
Contributions summary:Adam's commits primarily involve refactoring and improving the eXist-db codebase. The contributions focus on cleaning up code, switching to more modern APIs, and fixing bugs. The focus appears to be on the internals of the database, touching areas such as error handling, serialization, and database lookups.
xml-databasexqueryxmljavaxslt
facebook/rocksdb
Aug 2014 - Nov 2022
A library that provides an embeddable, persistent key-value store for fast storage.
Role in this project:Back-end Developer & Test Automation Engineer
Back-end Developer & Test Automation EngineerContributions:296 reviews, 315 commits, 260 PRs in 8 years 4 months
Contributions summary:Adam implemented and tested core functionality for the RocksDB library's comparator interface and various related components like slices and direct slices, which are integral to the key-value store's performance. Their work involved creating tests for several classes and methods like `ComparatorOptions`, `Comparator`, `DirectComparator`, and tests to verify correct behavior of range deletion and merge operations, crucial for data integrity. The commits also touched low-level details around memory allocation and C++ callbacks, suggesting deep engagement with the inner workings of RocksDB's core functionality. The user's changes included refactoring and adding tests, showing a focus on quality assurance and API stability.
key-value-storedatabasestorage-engine
Find and Hire Top DevelopersWe’ve analyzed the programming source code of over 60 million software developers on GitHub and scored them by 50,000 skills. Sign-up on Prog,AI to search for software developers.