Cliff Click
Entrepreneur at Stealth Mode Startup
Los Gatos, California, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolCliff Click is a veteran engineer, entrepreneur, and builder with over four decades of deep systems and JVM expertise, known for creating high-performance runtimes, novel GC algorithms, and lock-free data structures. As co-founder and former CTO of H2O and former Chief JVM Architect at Azul, he has led core infrastructure work for distributed machine learning and JVM compilers while personally shipping tens of thousands of lines of complex code per year. He holds a PhD in Computer Science and is the author of numerous patents and peer-reviewed papers, a prolific public speaker, and a repeat award-winner at industry conferences. Cliff combines hands-on low-level optimization—evident in contributions to projects like H2O-3 and JCTools—with senior leadership experience founding startups and mentoring high-productivity engineering teams. Less obvious: he sustains extreme technical velocity while balancing life as a single father of four, bringing pragmatic resilience to every project.
13 years of coding experience
24 years of employment as a software developer
PhD, Computer Science, PhD, Computer Science at Rice UniversityMS, Computer Science, MS, Computer Science at Texas A&M University
Stackoverflow
46reputation
991reached
2answers
0questions
Github Skills (15)
data-structures10
javas10
lock-free10
benchmark10
back-end-development10
data-structure10
concurrency10
queue10
java10
algorithms9
machine-learning8
neural-network6
h2o6
deep-learning6
r6
Programming languages (6)
Github contributions (5)
h2oai/h2o-3
Mar 2014 - Mar 2021
H2O is an Open Source, Distributed, Fast & Scalable Machine Learning Platform: Deep Learning, Gradient Boosting (GBM) & XGBoost, Random Forest, Generalized Linear Modeling (GLM with Elastic Net), K-Means, PCA, Generalized Additive Models (GAM), RuleFit, Support Vector Machine (SVM), Stacked Ensembles, Automatic Machine Learning (AutoML), etc.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:1967 commits, 21 PRs, 986 pushes in 7 years 1 month
Contributions summary:Cliff contributed to the H2O-3 repository by fixing bugs and implementing new features. Their contributions were focused on improving core functionality, including fixing bugs with tail calls and addressing issues related to column and row slicing operations within the H2O-3 codebase. The user modified the underlying Java code of the H2O-3 project, indicating they are likely working on core logic or a backend codebase. Their work involved detailed changes to the Java source code, demonstrating a proficiency in the implementation of low-level features, such as the efficient use of internal objects.
xgboostgampythonk-meansautoencoders
JCTools/JCTools
Mar 2016 - Mar 2021
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:15 commits, 3 PRs, 38 comments in 5 years 1 month
Contributions summary:Cliff's primary contribution focuses on integrating and adapting code from the `high_scale_lib` library. This involved copying and modifying the NonBlockingHashMap and associated components, as well as developing benchmark tests to evaluate the performance of these data structures. Further commits demonstrate the refinement of these tests through tweaks and adjustments to benchmark parameters and the incorporation of new test cases. The user also made improvements and optimizations to the testing harnesses.
concurrencyqueueswait-freebenchmarksdata-structures
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