Derek Collison
Founder & CEO at XPRIZE
Miami, Florida, United States
Summary
🤩
RockstarDerek Collison is a founder and CEO with ~30 years in distributed systems, cloud platforms, and secure messaging, currently leading Synadia to commercialize NATS as a global messaging utility. He architected foundational enterprise and cloud platforms—driving core messaging at TIBCO, co-founding Google’s AJAX APIs and CDN initiative, and designing Cloud Foundry while at VMware—then built Apcera to put policy and security into platform stacks. As creator of NATS and a primary contributor to its server and multi-language clients (Go, Rust, Node, Ruby), he blends deep protocol-level engineering with product vision for IoT, edge, and cloud at scale. An active investor and board member across AI, health, and innovation organizations, he brings both operator experience and strategic foresight into emerging tech trends. Less obvious: his work repeatedly bridges high-performance systems engineering with pragmatic security policy, enabling large enterprises to adopt cloud-native architectures without sacrificing control.
15 years of coding experience
26 years of employment as a software developer
Stackoverflow
191reputation
15kreached
10answers
0questions
Github Skills (44)
tls1210
cloud-foundry10
nat10
messaging10
routers10
protocol-buffers10
router10
distributed-systems10
tls1310
networking10
message-queue10
ruby10
mtls10
event-driven10
go10
Programming languages (19)
Github contributions (5)
nats-io/nats.rb
Oct 2010 - Mar 2016
Ruby client for NATS, the cloud native messaging system.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:489 commits, 12 PRs, 24 pushes in 5 years 5 months
Contributions summary:Derek's commits primarily focus on the development of the NATS server, a cloud-native messaging system. Their contributions involve implementing core server-side functionalities, including connection management, protocol parsing, and message routing. The user has been enhancing the server's capabilities, evidenced by additions like queue group support, SSL/TLS and code organization. The modifications show a strong understanding of network protocols and event-driven programming.
natsmessaging-systemruby-clientrubynative-messaging
nats-io/nats-server
Oct 2012 - Jan 2023
High-Performance server for NATS.io, the cloud and edge native messaging system.
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:18 releases, 3356 reviews, 3595 commits in 10 years 4 months
Contributions summary:Derek's commits focused on improving the performance and reliability of the NATS server's core functionality. Their contributions involved refactoring code related to internal queueing, message handling, and networking (e.g. WebSockets and service imports) to reduce memory allocations and optimize message processing, in particular addressing issues with the de-duplication logic. They also fixed a race condition within the API and introduced new functionality for a specific use-case involving a maximum "per-message TTL" (Time to Live) which added performance improvements to the codebase. Their work demonstrates a strong understanding of the NATS server's architecture and optimization techniques.
messaging-systemnats-ionative-messagingnatsmessage-bus
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