Bret Mcguire
Engineer, Adelphi at DataStax
Georgetown, Texas, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolBret Mcguire is a software engineer with a decade of experience designing and implementing distributed, highly concurrent systems, currently working on drivers and platform integration at DataStax. He combines deep systems and network programming expertise (Java, Python, Groovy) with a strong interest in security and cryptography, often focusing on practical compatibility and stability improvements. At DataStax he has contributed across projects—from OpsCenter backend work and gRPC time-series services to GraalVM support and a Quarkus Cassandra plugin—demonstrating versatility across languages and runtimes. His open-source contributions include reliability and protocol fixes to high-profile Cassandra drivers (DataStax Node.js and Apache Java drivers), highlighting attention to connection management, protocol negotiation, and cross-language type safety. Based in Georgetown, Texas, he pairs production-hardened engineering with a penchant for language/runtime details that surface only after long-scale deployments. Educated with a BS from University of Kansas and an MS from University of Minnesota, he thrives on solving the hard edge cases in distributed systems.
10 years of coding experience
18 years of employment as a software developer
University of KansasM.S., Computer Science, M.S., Computer Science at University of Minnesota
Github Skills (23)
javascript10
back-end-development10
cassandra10
databases10
java10
javas10
driver10
nodejs10
cassandra-database10
database10
typescript9
typescript-types9
typescripts9
mtls8
dns8
Programming languages (14)
Github contributions (5)
apache/cassandra-java-driver
Sep 2019 - Jan 2023
Java Driver for Apache Cassandra®
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:11 releases, 335 reviews, 92 commits in 3 years 3 months
Contributions summary:Bret primarily contributed to the Java Driver for Apache Cassandra, implementing new features and fixing bugs related to statement building and compression options. They added methods to the StatementBuilder class for setting tracing and routing keys, and enabled the "none" compression option. Additionally, they improved logging messages and addressed schema parsing issues related to DSE versions.
nosqlcassandraapachedatabasedatastax
datastax/nodejs-driver
May 2021 - Dec 2022
DataStax Node.js Driver for Apache Cassandra
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:47 reviews, 16 commits, 50 PRs in 1 year 7 months
Contributions summary:Bret primarily focused on improving the stability and functionality of the DataStax Node.js driver for Apache Cassandra. Their contributions include fixing critical issues related to connection management, such as re-resolving contact points after disconnections and downgrading protocol versions for compatibility. They also added missing protocol version definitions in TypeScript files, and added logging for SSL/TLS protocol negotiation. Furthermore, they addressed an issue in the DNS resolution process when adding new addresses.
driverdatastax-drivernosqlcassandranode-js
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