Brian Оlsen
Founder And Open Source Freelancer at Apache Iceberg
Chicago, Illinois, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolBrian Оlsen is a founder and open-source freelancer with 11 years of engineering experience who blends hands-on backend development, DevOps, and developer advocacy from a military-anchored systems background. He contributes to high-profile projects like Trino—where he enhanced Elasticsearch connector support for arrays and nested types—and maintains Apache Iceberg’s documentation and deployment pipelines. A former Marine sergeant, he brings disciplined systems thinking to large-data pipelines, federated search, and build/deploy automation. He has grown communities and educational infrastructure for Trino (including virtual summits with thousands of attendees) and scaled developer outreach through content and broadcasts. Based in Chicago, he pairs practical production experience (data lifecycle and migration work at Trustwave) with a passion for improving open-source tooling and documentation.
11 years of coding experience
12 years of employment as a software developer
Master of Science (MS) Computer Science, Master of Science (MS) Computer Science at Purdue UniversityHigh school diploma, High school diploma at Waterloo High SchoolBachelor of Science (BS) Computer Science, Bachelor of Science (BS) Computer Science at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville
English, Spanish
Github Skills (23)
github-ci10
amazon-elasticsearch10
bash10
mkdocs10
cicd10
java10
javas10
elasticsearchquery10
aws-elasticsearch10
sql10
query-engine10
elasticsearch10
githubaction-workflow10
elasticsearch-api10
apache9
Programming languages (17)
Github contributions (5)
apache/iceberg
Jan 2021 - Dec 2024
Apache Iceberg
Role in this project:
DevOps Engineer
DevOps EngineerContributions:116 reviews, 29 PRs, 176 comments in 4 years
Contributions summary:Brian focused on configuring and maintaining the documentation site for the Apache Iceberg project. Their contributions included modifying deployment scripts to integrate with GitHub Pages and the `asf-site` branch, updating environment setup, and setting up the deployment pipeline. They also implemented the build process using `mkdocs` and managed the necessary dependencies, and performed site cleanup.
apache-icebergapachebig-datadatastreamjava
trinodb/trino
Sep 2022 - Sep 2022
Official repository of Trino, the distributed SQL query engine for big data, formerly known as PrestoSQL (https://trino.io)
Role in this project:Backend Developer
Backend DeveloperContributions:133 reviews, 1 commit, 99 PRs in 1 day
Contributions summary:Brian contributed to the Trino project by implementing support for array data types within the Elasticsearch connector, enhancing its ability to handle complex data structures. They added functionality for nested data types and implemented the "asRawJson" decoding option for complex Elasticsearch fields. These changes involved modifying the Elasticsearch client and related classes to correctly parse and handle array and nested data, improving Trino's data querying capabilities for Elasticsearch indexes. Further contributions included adding helm chart documentation and basic concept/glossary entries, increasing developer understanding.
prestodbdbmsindexingjdbcbigdata
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