Balázs Bessenyei
Netherlands
Summary
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Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolBalázs Bessenyei is a freelance software engineer and technology leader based in the Netherlands with a decade of experience designing scalable distributed systems and data solutions. He blends hands-on backend and database engineering—evidenced by contributions and committer roles on high-profile Apache projects like CouchDB and Flume—with strategic product and technical leadership as CTO and staff engineer at Richmond Global Sciences. His work spans building resilient data pipelines, improving core database behavior in Erlang, and hardening logging infrastructure, plus practical API and documentation improvements that make systems easier to use. As a PMC member and former chair of Apache Flume, he brings open-source governance experience alongside deep engineering practice. He also teaches Java in German and has integrated Generative AI and vector-embedding solutions into production workflows, showing a rare mix of academic, community, and applied AI skills. Comfortable moving between low-level implementation details and high-level architecture, he is particularly skilled at making complex distributed systems reliable and developer-friendly.
10 years of coding experience
8 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor of Science - BS, Computer Engineering, Bachelor of Science - BS, Computer Engineering at Budapest University of Technology and EconomicsKarlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT)Aquincum Institute of Technology (AIT-Budapest)
English, German, Hungarian
Stackoverflow
580reputation
18kreached
36answers
2questions
Github Skills (27)
couchdb10
flume10
erlang10
testing10
configuration-management10
databases10
http10
java10
javas10
api-documentation10
rest-api10
documentation10
database10
back-end-development9
environment-variables9
Programming languages (13)
Github contributions (5)
apache/logging-flume
Oct 2016 - Jun 2022
Apache Flume is a distributed, reliable, and available service for efficiently collecting, aggregating, and moving large amounts of log-like data
Role in this project:
Backend Developer
Backend DeveloperContributions:6 reviews, 24 commits, 19 PRs in 5 years 8 months
Contributions summary:Balázs contributed to the Apache Flume project by addressing several issues and making enhancements. They updated POM versions, fixed flaky tests in the `TestBucketWriter` class by introducing a new constructor with a `Clock` parameter, and added support for environment variables in configuration files to enhance flexibility and security. Additionally, they fixed a minor typo in the `EmbeddedAgent` javadoc and updated the repository information in `VersionInfo`.
apachebig-dataflumejavaapache-flume
apache/couchdb
Oct 2019 - Jul 2021
Seamless multi-master syncing database with an intuitive HTTP/JSON API, designed for reliability
Role in this project:Back-end Developer & Database Engineer
Back-end Developer & Database EngineerContributions:57 reviews, 45 commits, 76 PRs in 1 year 8 months
Contributions summary:Balázs primarily contributed to enhancing the CouchDB backend, specifically improving error handling, and modifying how parameters are passed to database operations. They fixed issues related to the changes feed, ensuring correct responses for invalid heartbeat values, and allowed all parameters to be passed via the body for `_all_docs` and related endpoints. Their work also involved adapting code to handle boolean parameters effectively, fixing problems with the COPY document operation. This involved modifying Erlang code.
nosql-databaseintuitivejson-apierlangnetwork-client
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