Erik Grinaker
Member Of Technical Staff at Grinaker Solutions AS
Oslo, Norway
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolErik Grinaker is a seasoned systems software engineer with 22 years of experience building database internals, distributed systems, and storage engines from Oslo, Norway. He has led core infrastructure work at Cockroach Labs and contributed to high-profile open-source projects in the Cosmos/Tendermint ecosystem, often tackling concurrency, consensus and storage correctness. Adept in Rust and Go, he has built a distributed SQL database prototype (toydb) and worked on disaggregated storage for serverless PostgreSQL at Neon/Databricks. Erik combines deep low-level systems expertise with practical product-facing skills—debugging MVCC, designing range-deletion semantics, and improving resiliency to network partitions—while running his own consultancy since 2011. His GitHub tagline, "Cache rules everything around me," reflects a pragmatic focus on performance and memory management that recurs across his projects.
22 years of coding experience
21 years of employment as a software developer
Applied Science, Applied Science at Open Universities AustraliaBachelor of Science - BS Theoretical Physics, Bachelor of Science - BS Theoretical Physics at University of York
Norwegian, English
Stackoverflow
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Github Skills (36)
cosmos-sdk10
consensus10
golangci-lint10
testing10
distributed-systems10
pool10
data-structure10
go10
mpo10
sql10
database-design10
cryptography10
blockchain10
data-structures10
raft10
Programming languages (15)
Github contributions (5)
erikgrinaker/toydb
Apr 2019 - Apr 2022
Distributed SQL database in Rust, written as an educational project
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:4 reviews, 394 commits, 16 PRs in 3 years
Contributions summary:Erik primarily focused on implementing backend features and modifying the storage components of the toyDB project. They integrated the bincode serialization library across various components of the project, including the Raft server, SQL engine, and storage engines. Their work involved refactoring and enhancing the storage layer, with modifications to the key/value engine and the integration of the Raft protocol. The contributions also included adding functionality for dealing with key-value data structures and the use of memory management techniques.
learning-projectdistributed-sql-databasemysqlrustsql-database
cosmos/iavl
Feb 2020 - Jan 2021
Merkleized IAVL+ Tree implementation in Go
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:17 releases, 26 reviews, 87 commits in 11 months
Contributions summary:Erik primarily contributed to the `iavl` repository by addressing and fixing code quality issues, such as fixing golangci-lint warnings, and implementing new features. They fixed concurrent database access issues and added an export/import API for the tree. The user also made changes related to proof code, and the removal of Amino, indicating their involvement in the core functionality and data structures of the Merkleized IAVL+ Tree implementation.
golangcryptographyblockchainmerkle-tree
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