David Turner
Distributed Systems Engineer at Elastic
England, United Kingdom
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolDavid Turner is a Distributed Systems Engineer with 12 years of experience designing and operating large-scale, high-availability systems, currently driving distributed infrastructure work at Elastic. He combines a strong academic foundation—a Cambridge PhD in Computer Science and a first-class Mathematics degree—with hands-on technical leadership gained building and evolving mission-critical planning and optimisation software for the UK rail industry. Equally comfortable in low-level POSIX and database work as in cloud-native architectures on AWS, he has a track record of shipping pragmatic designs under tight commercial timelines and hitting multi-million-pound targets. An active open-source contributor in the Haskell ecosystem, his work on widely used projects such as stack, servant and yesod shows deep expertise in build tooling, web DSLs and caching/session semantics. Colleagues describe him as an analytical architect who balances rigorous engineering with practical product delivery and cultivates team processes that sustain rapid, reliable releases.
12 years of coding experience
4 years of employment as a software developer
MA (Hons), Mathematics, 1st, MA (Hons), Mathematics, 1st at University of CambridgeStockport Grammar School
English, French
Stackoverflow
1,866reputation
207kreached
40answers
4questions
elasticsearch
top-5%
soap
top-5%
Github Skills (47)
git10
caching10
back-end-development10
package-management10
api-design10
amazon-elasticsearch10
time-management10
build-system10
java10
javas10
elasticsearchquery10
autoupdate10
aws-elasticsearch10
computer-engineering10
servant10
Programming languages (17)
Github contributions (5)
elastic/elasticsearch
Sep 2017 - Jan 2023
Free and Open Source, Distributed, RESTful Search Engine
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:5464 reviews, 2562 commits, 4554 PRs in 5 years 4 months
Contributions summary:David's contributions primarily involve improving the code base by removing unused or deprecated features. They focused on refining various APIs, specifically those related to cluster state updates, snapshot management, and data stream operations. These changes included streamlining code, enhancing exception handling, and making the code more robust. The work demonstrated a strong focus on improving the overall maintainability and efficiency of the Elasticsearch codebase.
restfulsearch-engineopensearchelasticsearchjava
haskell-servant/servant
May 2017 - May 2017
Servant is a Haskell DSL for describing, serving, querying, mocking, documenting web applications and more!
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:28 commits, 1 PR, 7 comments in 1 day
Contributions summary:David contributed significantly to the `servant` library, a Haskell DSL for web applications. Their primary focus was on expanding the API's capabilities, specifically by introducing and implementing features related to the `EmptyAPI` combinator. This included adding the `EmptyAPI` type, re-exporting it, creating server and client instances for it, and integrating it into the documentation and examples. These changes aimed to enhance the flexibility and completeness of the API definition within the `servant` ecosystem.
web-applicationsservingqueryinghaskelldsl
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