David Glasser
Software Engineer at Apollo GraphQL
Berkeley, California, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolDavid Glasser is a seasoned software engineer with 19 years of experience building scalable backend and DevOps systems from Google to Apollo GraphQL, now based in Berkeley. He specializes in distributed systems, infrastructure-as-code, and GraphQL tooling—contributing core features and fixes to high-profile open-source projects like HashiCorp Terraform and Apollo Server/Federation. His work spans languages and ecosystems (notably Go and Node.js), improving reliability, caching/persisted-query handling, and cloud integrations for projects such as Apache Druid and Secor. At Apollo he shipped server-side features that bridge developer ergonomics and production robustness, reflecting a pragmatic focus on observability and operational edge cases. An MIT-trained mathematician and computer scientist, he pairs rigorous technical foundations with a knack for debugging complex distributed behaviors. Colleagues would note his quiet impact on critical internals—small, well-targeted changes that improve large systems’ stability and developer experience.
19 years of coding experience
12 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor’s Degree, Mathematics and Computer Science, Bachelor’s Degree, Mathematics and Computer Science at Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Github Skills (75)
programming-language10
cloud-manager10
http10
websocket10
apollo-server10
apache-druid10
terraform10
javas10
apollo-client10
encoding10
apollo10
backend10
javascript10
terraformer10
api10
Programming languages (30)
Github contributions (5)
apollographql/apollo-server
Mar 2018 - Jan 2023
🌍 Spec-compliant and production ready JavaScript GraphQL server that lets you develop in a schema-first way. Built for Express, Connect, Hapi, Koa, and more.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:849 reviews, 946 commits, 962 PRs in 4 years 10 months
Contributions summary:David primarily contributed to the core functionalities of Apollo Server, particularly focusing on cache control and persisted query support. Their contributions included adding features related to managing and interpreting cache policies, and implementing the handling of persisted query requests, including error handling and retrieval of query strings. These changes involved modifications to core modules, such as request pipeline and various plugins, enhancing the server's features and improving compatibility with new features.
production-readyexpresshapijsgraphql-serverproduction
apollographql/federation
Jun 2019 - Oct 2022
🌐 Build and scale a single data graph across multiple services with Apollo's federation gateway.
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:222 reviews, 109 commits, 89 PRs in 3 years 4 months
Contributions summary:David primarily contributed to the Apollo Federation gateway, focusing on enhancing its functionality and maintainability. Their work included debugging and improving documentation, refining the query plan generation process, and implementing metrics support for federated systems. They also addressed dependency issues and improved internal testing procedures to ensure the reliability of the gateway. The user’s contributions spanned several files related to gateway, federation, and reporting functionality.
graph-datascaleapollo-federationgatewayfederation
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