Ask Solem
Principal Software Engineer at Robinhood
Palo Alto, California, United States
Summary
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Rockstar
Top expert inPython Development Ecosystem
Ask Solem is a Principal Software Engineer with 15 years of experience building and optimizing distributed systems, stream processing, and messaging infrastructure. Creator of Celery and a long-time contributor to core projects like kombu, py-amqp, and aio-kafka, he blends deep systems programming (C, Python) with practical backend and data engineering at scale. Based in Palo Alto, he drives reliability and performance work at Robinhood while previously shaping RabbitMQ and Celery integrations at Pivotal and VMware. His contributions often focus on low-level refactors, cross-platform multiprocessing fixes, and hardening test suites—work that quietly reduces production incidents and improves developer ergonomics. Colleagues rely on him for pragmatic architecture decisions, careful reverse engineering, and clear documentation that makes complex distributed behavior observable and maintainable.
15 years of coding experience
8 years of employment as a software developer
Norwegian, English
Stackoverflow
26reputation
1kreached
1answer
0questions
Github Skills (48)
asynchronous10
unit-testing10
pytest10
messaging10
python10
redis10
amqp10
back-end-development10
async10
django10
testing10
kafka10
data-serialization10
celery10
queuing10
Programming languages (4)
Github contributions (5)
celery/kombu
Dec 2010 - Feb 2017
Messaging library for Python.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:2256 commits, 44 PRs, 337 pushes in 6 years 3 months
Contributions summary:Ask contributed to the kombu library by implementing various features and fixes, including bumping versions and updating the changelog to reflect those changes. Their work involved modifications to the core components of the library, specifically the initialization and connection management parts as well as the message serialization. Further contributions included enhancements to the processing of messages within the queue by adding and implementing features related to queuing and message control such as message prioritization.
python-librarykombupythonredisasyncio
celery/celery
Dec 2010 - Feb 2017
Distributed Task Queue (development branch)
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:6185 commits, 177 PRs, 1020 pushes in 6 years 3 months
Contributions summary:Ask's contributions focus on enhancing the Celery distributed task queue system, implementing and maintaining back-end logic. They added a new setting to configure the socket connect timeout and made modifications to include and exclude queues. In addition, the user made changes to internal code dealing with results in the process and improved message handling, revealing strong skills in core systems programming.
queue-taskspythonworkerqueued-jobstask-runner
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