Daniel Tao
Head Of Engineering, Confluence Cloud at Code2College
Austin, Texas, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolDaniel Tao is a seasoned engineering leader with 15 years of experience building and scaling developer-focused products, currently heading Confluence Cloud engineering at Atlassian. He has led globally distributed teams across Bitbucket, Jira Software integrations, and DevOps products, blending deep product stewardship with reliability, security, and monetization responsibilities. A former Googler and ThoughtWorker with an MS in software engineering from Carnegie Mellon, he pairs rigorous technical foundations with hands-on experience from startups to large enterprises. He contributes to open source tooling—most notably adding Protocol Buffers support to the widely used highlight.js syntax highlighter—reflecting a pragmatic attention to developer experience. Based in Austin, he also volunteers teaching coding to underrepresented high school students, showing a commitment to community and talent development.
15 years of coding experience
15 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor of Arts - BA Philosophy, Bachelor of Arts - BA Philosophy at Duke UniversityMaster of Science - MS Software Engineering, Master of Science - MS Software Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University
Stackoverflow
127,203reputation
14.7mreached
1,050answers
267questions
type-conversion
top-5%
ruby
top-5%
dictionary
top-5%
regex
top-5%
oop
top-5%
concurrency
top-1%
Github Skills (69)
multithreading10
linq10
loops10
vbnet10
concurrency10
operator10
javascript10
protocol-buffers10
parallel-processing10
grammars10
increment10
java10
delegates10
generics10
syntax-highlighting10
Programming languages (8)
Github contributions (5)
highlightjs/highlight.js
Jan 2014 - Jan 2014
JavaScript syntax highlighter with language auto-detection and zero dependencies.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer & Documentation Specialist
Back-end Developer & Documentation SpecialistContributions:7 commits in 1 day
Contributions summary:Daniel primarily contributed to the implementation of a new language definition for Protocol Buffers within the syntax highlighter. Their work involved defining keywords, built-in types, and adjusting the highlighting rules to accurately reflect the protobuf syntax. Additionally, the user modified the documentation, specifically updating the CSS classes reference to include the new protobuf language and reflect the updated class names used for highlighting.
dependencieshighlightzerosyntax-highlighterjavascript-syntax
dtao/fancy-server
Nov 2013 - Apr 2015
Contributions:24 commits, 1 push, 1 tag in 1 year 5 months
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