Colin Stolley
Senior Software Engineer, Query Execution at MongoDB
Chicago, Illinois, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolColin Stolley is a senior software engineer with 11 years of experience specializing in systems programming, database internals, and high-performance back-end engineering. He currently focuses on query execution at MongoDB and has a strong track record improving core storage and query performance in a major open-source database. Previously he worked on reliable git storage and replication at GitHub—contributing optimizations to libgit2 and large-repo reference lookups—and built scalable, multi-threaded data pipelines and services at Sprout Social. Comfortable in C, C++, Java, and Python, he combines low-level systems insight with pragmatic engineering for production scale. An unexpected strength is his cross-disciplinary background, including legal studies, which complements his meticulous, audit-ready approach to complex systems.
11 years of coding experience
20 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor of Science - BS, Computer Science, Bachelor of Science - BS, Computer Science at University of Wisconsin-MadisonDoctor of Law - JD, Doctor of Law - JD at UIC John Marshall Law School
German
Stackoverflow
1reputation
0reached
1answer
0questions
Github Skills (23)
git10
c-language10
binary-search10
databases10
c1110
data-structure10
mongodb-database10
c1710
performance-optimization10
data-structures10
cprogramming-language10
mongodb10
relational-databases10
sql-database10
database10
Programming languages (7)
Github contributions (5)
libgit2/libgit2
Sep 2021 - Jun 2022
A cross-platform, linkable library implementation of Git that you can use in your application.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:2 reviews, 28 commits, 4 PRs in 9 months
Contributions summary:Colin contributed to the `libgit2/libgit2` repository by addressing bugs and improving the performance of the library. Their work included fixing a merge bug related to file modes during renames and adding a test case to verify the fix. They also significantly optimized ref lookups by implementing a binary search using mmap for packed-refs files, enhancing efficiency for repositories with numerous references. Additionally, the user contributed code updates, refactoring, and optimizations related to the commit-graph functionality, which is core to the git functionality.
version-controlgit-clientlibgit2dvcscross-platform
mongodb/mongo
Sep 2022 - Jan 2023
The MongoDB Database
Role in this project:Back-end Developer & Database Engineer
Back-end Developer & Database EngineerContributions:13 commits in 4 months
Contributions summary:Colin primarily focused on implementing enhancements and fixes to the MongoDB database core, particularly around storage and query execution. They contributed to optimizing the column store feature, implementing the on-disk size metric, and adding custom statistics. In addition, the user refactored existing code and improved performance by converting calls to lambdas and avoiding unnecessary data copies within loops. These changes directly improved the performance and efficiency of the MongoDB database.
nosqlc-plus-plusmongodb-databasedatabasemongodb
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