Conrad Ludgate is a Systems Software Engineer based in London with 10 years of backend and systems experience, focused on high-performance Rust services and database proxying. He led Neon’s Proxy service through rapid scaling and low-latency, secure connection handling—building an efficient Rust implementation and growing the team from one to four engineers—then continued that work at Databricks post-acquisition. Conrad contributes to prominent open-source Rust projects (including rust-analyzer and chrono) where he’s added IDE assists and performance optimizations, and to Neon and deadpool where he improved DB security, connection reliability and pool performance. He has a strong background in applying Rust to real-world systems problems—optimizing resource usage in serverless and agent-driven workloads—and pairs that with practical math training from King’s College London. Notably, his open-source commits show an eye for careful refactoring and test coverage, not just feature work.
9 years of coding experience
6 years of employment as a software developer
Mathematics and Computer Science, Mathematics and Computer Science at Exeter Mathematics School
Contributions:348 reviews, 72 commits, 201 PRs in 2 years
Contributions summary:Conrad made significant contributions to the atuinsh/atuin repository, which focuses on shell history management. Their commits primarily revolved around refactoring the code, including implementing a structopt wrapper, using project directories for data storage, and updating the database interaction. The user also focused on core functionality, specifically, supporting the fish shell and handling user registration and login features by switching to axum.
Neon: Serverless Postgres. We separated storage and compute to offer autoscaling, code-like database branching, and scale to zero.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer & Database Engineer
Contributions:650 reviews, 569 PRs, 1104 pushes in 2 years 5 months
Contributions summary:Conrad primarily focused on improving the core functionality of the Neon database server, as evidenced by changes involving PBKDF2 crate integration, database security measures, and implementing connection retry mechanisms. This involved modifications to the database's core components, including the proxy and session management. The changes indicate a focus on performance enhancements, code refactoring, and fixing crucial bugs related to connectivity and resource management within the database environment.
neonrustserverlessautoscalingoffer
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