Ben Stopford
United Kingdom
Summary
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RockstarBen Stopford is a seasoned software engineer and technology leader with 12 years of experience building distributed data platforms and event-driven systems, most recently as Lead Technologist at Confluent where he led the CTO function and Developer Experience. He combines deep hands-on expertise in Apache Kafka—contributing to core replication, security and tooling—with practical architecture and delivery experience from senior roles at RBS and Barclays. Ben has a track record of initiating and scaling critical data infrastructure (including a bank-wide central data platform) and translating complex distributed-systems problems into reliable production solutions. Author of Designing Event-Driven Systems, he blends thought leadership with engineering rigor and a focus on data consistency, transactional messaging and developer productivity. An uncommon strength is his ability to move between low-level protocol work and high-level strategy, making him effective both as a coder and as a department leader.
12 years of coding experience
14 years of employment as a software developer
Github Skills (15)
testing10
javas10
microservices-application10
rest-api10
apache-kafka10
microservices10
replication10
back-end-development10
kafka-streams10
java10
scala9
zookeeper9
command-line-tool9
avro7
cicd6
Programming languages (4)
Github contributions (5)
apache/kafka
Aug 2015 - Jun 2017
Mirror of Apache Kafka
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:52 commits, 57 PRs, 351 comments in 1 year 10 months
Contributions summary:Ben primarily contributed to the back-end infrastructure and core functionalities of Apache Kafka. Their commits focused on enhancements and bug fixes within the Kafka ecosystem, including enabling new consumer features, improving logging, and adding throttling options for replication. Furthermore, they implemented changes related to security features such as SSL cipher suite configuration and rolling upgrades for secure clusters. Their work also touched upon command-line tools and tests for managing and verifying the cluster.
apache-kafkakafka-consumerapachescalakafka
confluentinc/kafka-streams-examples
Oct 2017 - Sep 2018
Demo applications and code examples for Apache Kafka's Streams API.
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:49 commits, 27 PRs, 27 pushes in 10 months
Contributions summary:Ben primarily contributed to the `OrdersService` within a microservices architecture, implementing REST endpoints, and integrating with Apache Kafka for data processing. Their work included refactoring materialized views and addressing issues within a transactional producer/consumer for order details, demonstrating a focus on data consistency and reliable message handling. The user also updated the `ValidationsAggregatorService` with session windows, to facilitate a robust approach for state management of orders. These changes indicate an effort to improve the system's stability and data integrity.
apiapache-kafkademo-applicationsstream-processingkafka-streams
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