Dave Rolsky
Senior Software Engineer, DB Tools And Replicator
Minneapolis, Minnesota, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolDave Rolsky is a senior software engineer and technical leader with 26 years of experience building scalable backend systems, currently focused on DB tools and replication at MongoDB. He combines hands-on engineering in Go, C, Perl, and Python with proven team leadership—hiring, mentoring, establishing workflows, and improving CI and testing practices at companies like MaxMind and ActiveState. An active open-source contributor, he’s worked on widely used projects such as sqlboiler and the libmaxminddb family, improving database interoperability and robustness. He’s comfortable across the stack from low-level C libraries to cloud-native services running on Kubernetes and RDS. A longtime speaker on Go and Perl, he brings a rare mix of production-hardened systems design and developer tooling expertise. Unusually for an engineer of his tenure, he also holds an MA in music composition, reflecting a creative background that informs his pragmatic approach to problem solving.
26 years of coding experience
19 years of employment as a software developer
BA Music, BA Music at Bard CollegeMA Music Composition, MA Music Composition at University of Minnesota
Stackoverflow
4,532reputation
757kreached
38answers
0questions
console
top-5%
abstract
top-5%
perl
top-1%
Github Skills (74)
postgresql10
wordpress-themes10
python10
testing10
bash10
templater10
c1110
perl10
phpunit10
c1710
ui-theme10
rest-api10
coding-style10
code-optimization10
routers10
Programming languages (26)
Github contributions (5)
maxmind/libmaxminddb
May 2013 - Nov 2016
C library for the MaxMind DB file format
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:2 releases, 616 commits, 21 PRs in 3 years 6 months
Contributions summary:Dave made several code changes to the C library for the MaxMind DB file format. The contributions involved making defines consistent, removing trailing whitespace, eliminating extra parentheses, and simplifying implementation of the `MMDB_get_tree` function. Furthermore, the user refactored the code, including changes to error handling and function renaming. The contributions focused on code style, performance improvements, and bug fixes.
c-librarymaxmind
mongodb/mongo-tools
May 2022 - Nov 2022
Role in this project:Backend Developer
Backend DeveloperContributions:170 reviews, 90 commits, 211 PRs in 6 months
Contributions summary:Dave primarily contributed to the `mongodb/mongo-tools` repository by implementing features and fixing bugs. Their work included adding Evergreen configurations for testing on Debian 11, upgrading a driver, and adding support for clustered collections to mongorestore, which involved test suite modifications. Furthermore, the user addressed a `bsonutil.IsEqual` issue and added tests to enhance the index deletion functionality. The user also updated the Go driver and addressed some Windows CI issues.
Find and Hire Top DevelopersWe’ve analyzed the programming source code of over 60 million software developers on GitHub and scored them by 50,000 skills. Sign-up on Prog,AI to search for software developers.