Caleb Hattingh
Principal Software Engineer at Kapiche
Italy
Summary
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Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolCaleb Hattingh is a Principal Software Engineer with 13 years of experience building scalable, data-heavy systems and leading engineering teams across startups and enterprise environments. Based in Italy, he designs and ships production-grade NLP and analytics backends—recently delivering a custom Rust-backed vector similarity engine and multiple parquet/Polars OLAP solutions that replaced Milvus under heavy load. A hands-on leader, he blends IC work with team coaching and process improvements (introducing rotating triage and kanban-like workflows) and has deep expertise in async Python—authoring an O’Reilly book and producing a Cython video course. His open-source contributions include backend work on the popular xonsh shell and UI fixes for the Spyder IDE, plus technical writing for the Python Packaging guide. Caleb is exploring Rust to raise software safety and performance across ML and serverless workloads, and he has a track record of inventing practical engineering shortcuts (e.g., custom Ray remote mechanics) when tooling falls short.
13 years of coding experience
22 years of employment as a software developer
Master of Science - MSc Chemical Engineering, Master of Science - MSc Chemical Engineering at University of Cape Town
Italian, English, Afrikaans, Dutch
Stackoverflow
9,095reputation
2.8mreached
141answers
8questions
data-structures
top-1%
vb6
top-1%
dictionary
top-5%
ipython
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pip
top-5%
generator
top-5%
Github Skills (44)
virtual-environment10
qt10
python10
paths10
vb610
spyder10
packaging10
command-line10
management10
data-structures10
xonsh10
shell10
documentation10
testing9
filesystem9
Programming languages (14)
Github contributions (5)
spyder-ide/spyder
Feb 2015 - Sep 2016
Official repository for Spyder - The Scientific Python Development Environment
Role in this project:
Full-stack Developer
Full-stack DeveloperContributions:3 PRs, 43 comments, 1 issue in 1 year 7 months
Contributions summary:Caleb's contributions primarily address UI/UX improvements and bug fixes within the Spyder IDE. Their work involves adjusting the appearance of tab elements and dock widgets to enhance the user experience, specifically addressing visual issues on macOS. They also made various changes to the codebase, including merging updates from upstream and default branches. Additionally, the user addressed minor build and dependency issues.
pythonpyqt5anaconda-distributionanacondapyqt
xonsh/xonsh
Aug 2019 - Oct 2019
:shell: Python-powered shell. Full-featured and cross-platform.
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:12 commits, 2 PRs, 24 comments in 1 month
Contributions summary:Caleb primarily focused on enhancing the `xonsh/xonsh` shell's virtual environment management through the `vox` tool. Their contributions included implementing absolute path usage within the `$PATH` environment variable for virtual environments, ensuring correct activation and deactivation behavior. The user also added tests to verify the changes and addressed a CI failure related to Windows compatibility. Furthermore, the user updated documentation to reflect the modifications and exposed new path parameters in the events.
unixiterm2pythonsystem-administrationxonsh
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