Chas Honton
Principal Engineer at Proofpoint
Mountain View, California, United States
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolChas Honton is a Principal Engineer based in Mountain View with over three decades of engineering experience and 13 years in senior roles building large-scale, production systems. He currently leads the Message Intelligence Service at Proofpoint, architecting pipelines that process tens of billions of messages daily using Kafka, KafkaStreams, and OpenSearch on Kubernetes in AWS. A pragmatic engineering manager and mentor, he focuses on vision, process improvement, and empowering engineers to find their strengths while consistently delivering reliable systems. Chas is an active open-source contributor with practical DevOps and Java library improvements—contributions include enhancements to the docker-maven-plugin, Kafka Operator build automation, and core fixes in Apache Commons Lang’s date parsing. He couples deep systems and protocol-level experience (from embedded firmware and DAQ hardware early in his career) with modern cloud-native practices and CI/CD automation. His blend of hands-on coding, architecture, and documented process creation makes him effective at turning complex, high-throughput requirements into operable, auditable platforms.
13 years of coding experience
24 years of employment as a software developer
Diploma cum laude College Preparatory, Diploma cum laude College Preparatory at Bishop WattersonBS Computer Engineering, BS Computer Engineering at Case Western Reserve University
Stackoverflow
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Github Skills (22)
kubernetes10
docker10
configuration-management10
date-parsing10
kafka10
kubernetes-operator10
dockers10
java10
javas10
apache-commons-lang10
build-automation10
kubernetes-pods10
maven10
timezone10
devops10
Programming languages (9)
Github contributions (5)
fabric8io/docker-maven-plugin
Apr 2016 - Jul 2022
Maven plugin for running and creating Docker images
Role in this project:
Back-end & DevOps Engineer
Back-end & DevOps EngineerContributions:9 reviews, 25 commits, 45 PRs in 6 years 4 months
Contributions summary:Chas's contributions primarily center around enhancing the `docker-maven-plugin`. Their work involved adding support for `docker machine` by integrating its functionalities to obtain environment settings. The changes included modifications to the `DockerEnvironment.java` and `DockerMachine.java` to accommodate features like machine creation and status checking. Further contributions extended authentication and AWS ECR key exchange functionalities.
maven-pluginmavenjenkins-api-plugindockerfabric8
apache/commons-lang
Sep 2012 - Jul 2018
Apache Commons Lang
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:58 commits, 6 PRs, 18 comments in 5 years 10 months
Contributions summary:Chas primarily contributed to the Apache Commons Lang library by modifying the `FastDateParser` class. Their work involved enhancing the parsing capabilities, specifically addressing issues related to time zone handling and the interpretation of date formats. Key changes included improvements to how the parser handles optional trailing periods in abbreviated month names and the inclusion of ISO 8601 time zone formats, as well as code cleanup. These changes directly impacted the library's core functionality for parsing dates.
commonslangapacheapache-commonsapache-commons-lang
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