Andrew Purtell
Vice President, Apache Bigtop at The Apache Software Foundation
Los Angeles, California, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolAndrew Purtell is a seasoned distributed-systems architect and open-source leader with 17+ years building large-scale data platforms, from Hadoop/HBase and cloud storage to virtualization and kernel-level networking. As Vice President for Apache Bigtop and Apache HBase and a long-time committer on Phoenix, he combines deep systems programming (C/C++, Java, kernel/driver work) with packaging, DevOps, and release management for widely adopted Apache projects. His contributions span performance-sensitive HBase internals (WAL, compaction, split operations) to packaging and deployment automation in Bigtop, reflecting an uncommon blend of low-level engineering and infrastructure productization. He has driven encryption, ACLs, and large-memory JVM tuning for enterprise Hadoop deployments and advised industry partners on making big data stacks production-ready. Based in Los Angeles, he also brings experience in protocol design, embedded firmware, and security-focused systems research—skills that surface in both his code and his leadership.
17 years of coding experience
16 years of employment as a software developer
Computer Science, Computer Science at Northeastern University
Github Skills (27)
hbase10
bigtop10
packaging10
databases10
big-data10
bash10
java10
javas10
phoenix-liveview10
phoenix-framework10
devops10
apache-phoenix10
database10
puppeteer9
hadoop-mapreduce9
Programming languages (8)
Github contributions (5)
apache/hbase
Nov 2008 - Jan 2023
Apache HBase
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:618 reviews, 3023 commits, 436 PRs in 14 years 4 months
Contributions summary:Andrew contributed to the Apache HBase project by making multiple changes to improve the performance and maintainability of the codebase. The user focused on improving the WAL related code. These changes include supporting value compression, providing an API to check the existence of a namespace, making the HTable get operations non-interruptible and improvements to the logging of various operations.
apache-hbaseapachedatabasejavahbase
apache/phoenix
Feb 2014 - Aug 2022
Apache Phoenix
Role in this project:Backend Developer
Backend DeveloperContributions:19 reviews, 61 commits, 6 PRs in 8 years 7 months
Contributions summary:Andrew primarily focused on updating the Apache Phoenix codebase, addressing issues related to dependencies and HBase compatibility. They made significant changes to the code, including replacing dependencies like `org.xerial.snappy` with a pure Java implementation (`org.iq80.snappy`) and adjusting interfaces to align with changes in HBase versions. Further modifications included addressing contract issues with `RegionScanner.nextRaw` and optimizing security contexts within compaction/split coprocessor hooks.
sqlapache-phoenixelixirapachebig-data
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