Brett Hoerner
Principal Systems Engineer at Cloudflare
Austin, Texas, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolBrett Hoerner is a Principal Systems Engineer with 17 years of experience designing and operating large-scale distributed systems, currently based in Austin and recently returned to Cloudflare. He blends software engineering and site reliability expertise, with a track record at Cloudflare Workers, PostHog, Sentry, and multiple high-throughput data platforms where he migrated core stores and scaled ingestion pipelines. Comfortable across C++, Scala, Kafka, ClickHouse and cloud infrastructure, he has hands-on experience building durable, production-grade services and developer-facing APIs. Brett contributes to open source—ranging from documentation for Sentry to substantive fixes in the Cap'n Proto C++ RPC/serialization code—reflecting both care for developer ergonomics and low-level systems work. Known humorously as a “digital janitor,” he prefers roles that mix coding and operational responsibility and is open to opportunities after a sabbatical. An understated strength is his history of tackling thorny migrations and reliability problems that unlock product agility at scale.
17 years of coding experience
18 years of employment as a software developer
BS CS Computer Science, BS CS Computer Science at The University of Texas at Dallas
English
Stackoverflow
828reputation
31kreached
26answers
3questions
Github Skills (28)
asynchronous10
markdown10
c-language10
tls1210
async10
tls1310
networking10
mtls10
rpc10
markdown-it10
libtls10
cprogramming-language10
documentation10
serialization9
data-serialization9
Programming languages (19)
Github contributions (5)
getsentry/sentry-docs
Feb 2017 - Dec 2018
Sentry's documentation (and tools to build it)
Role in this project:
Technical Writer
Technical WriterContributions:24 commits, 24 PRs, 35 pushes in 1 year 10 months
Contributions summary:Brett primarily contributed to the project by updating and expanding the documentation for the Sentry SDK. Their changes included improvements to existing documentation regarding client development, context management, and expected features. They also added content about Java SDK usage, including configuration, context, and various modules. Further contributions included fixing broken links and improving the overall organization and layout of the documentation.
sentrysentry-documentationtag-productionteam-web-frontend
capnproto/capnproto
Jan 2020 - May 2021
Cap'n Proto serialization/RPC system - core tools and C++ library
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:46 reviews, 9 commits, 9 PRs in 1 year 3 months
Contributions summary:Brett primarily focused on improving the Cap'n Proto serialization/RPC system's core tools and C++ library. Their contributions included extending the `kj::one-of.h` file to support a 9-way variant, modifying the `Canceler` class in `kj/async.h` and `capnp/compat/http-over-capnp.c++` to fix issues and change the default exception type, and splitting large byte-stream writes into smaller chunks within `capnp/compat/byte-stream.c++`. Furthermore, the user addressed TLS handshake errors by modifying code in `kj/compat/tls.c++` and exposed `RpcSystemBase`'s accept loop promise by modifying `c++/src/capnp/rpc.c++` and corresponding header files. Lastly, they added an acceptTimeout option to TLS.
cpprpcserialization
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