Dhanji Prasanna
Executive Advisor at Block
Sydney, New South Wales, Australia
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolDhanji Prasanna is a seasoned engineering leader and architect with 15+ years building high-scale web and search systems, currently advising Block after serving as CTO and Head of Engineering for Square Cash. He has a rare blend of hands-on systems design and product leadership, having led realtime search and infrastructure at Google (including work on Wave and Google+) and founded the instant-search startup Fluent. Dhanji’s open-source footprint is substantial—creator of Guice Servlet and Sitebricks and an active contributor to projects like misk and polyglot-maven—demonstrating a focus on backend reliability, schema validation, and developer ergonomics. His work has repeatedly improved performance by orders of magnitude (Fluent’s search and email sync stack famously outperformed industry standards) and powers pageviews across major Google services and Square APIs. Based in Sydney, he combines international enterprise experience with startup grit and a playful “aspiring mad scientist” ethos that surfaces in experimental infrastructure work. He is known for translating deep Java and scalability expertise into pragmatic, production-ready systems that developers can rely on.
15 years of coding experience
15 years of employment as a software developer
BS Computer Science, BS Computer Science at Marquette University
Github Skills (15)
maven10
kotlin10
javas10
configuration-management10
microservices-application10
parser10
microservices10
parsing10
parse10
java10
xml-parsing9
testing9
error-handling9
xml9
hibernate8
Programming languages (4)
Github contributions (5)
cashapp/misk
Mar 2019 - Apr 2019
Microservice Kontainer
Role in this project:
Backend Developer
Backend DeveloperContributions:10 commits, 16 PRs, 10 pushes in 1 month
Contributions summary:Dhanji primarily contributed to backend improvements and bug fixes within the `misk` microservice framework. Their work included resolving `IOException` issues related to Docker, enhancing configuration error messages, and correcting potential `NullPointerException` occurrences in test logging. They also modified the testing environment and updated Kotlin versions, indicating a focus on improving the reliability and maintainability of the codebase. The user also made changes to schema validation, demonstrating the importance of data integrity within the microservices.
dockermicroservicemicroservices
takari/polyglot-maven
Apr 2012 - May 2012
Support alternative markup for Apache Maven POM files
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:10 commits, 1 comment, 1 issue in 1 month
Contributions summary:Dhanji primarily focused on enhancing the atom grammar parser for Apache Maven POM files. Their work involved fixing tests, making the parser more lenient with packaging, and implementing support for plugin overrides and nested configuration elements. The user's commits also included improvements to property expression parsing for versions.
maven-pluginmavenapachemaven-pommarkup
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