Garren Smith
Senior Database Engineer
Gauteng, South Africa
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolGarren Smith is a Senior Database Engineer with 17 years of software experience and a 13-year track record of versatile, full‑stack contributions across frontend, backend, and testing. He combines deep expertise in distributed databases—evident from long-term contributions to Apache CouchDB, PouchDB and work on Prisma’s query engine—with practical skills in Rust, Erlang, Node.js and frontend React. At Prisma and IBM he led architecture and resiliency work (connection pooling, actor-based interactive transactions, FoundationDB-backed cores) that noticeably improved scalability and reliability under heavy load. A natural planner and remote-first worker of over eight years, he’s repeatedly praised for accurate delivery estimates and steady high output. Active in open source and project leadership, he serves on the Apache CouchDB PMC and has shipped user-facing improvements such as Fauxton integrations and CouchDB documentation. An engineer who prefers solving the right problem over defending technologies, he blends hands-on coding with technical leadership and a knack for making complex database systems predictable.
17 years of coding experience
9 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor of Engineering - BE, Electrical and Electronics Engineering, Bachelor of Engineering - BE, Electrical and Electronics Engineering at University of the Witwatersrand
Github Skills (50)
test-automation10
json10
api-rest10
hadoop-mapreduce10
couchdb10
javascript10
postgresql10
expressjs10
cockroachdb10
back-end-development10
api-design10
mysql10
restful-api10
testing10
query-tuning10
Programming languages (15)
Github contributions (5)
apache/couchdb-fauxton
Nov 2012 - Sep 2020
Fauxton is the new Web UI for CouchDB
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer & Database Engineer
Back-end Developer & Database EngineerContributions:1 release, 14 reviews, 446 commits in 7 years 11 months
Contributions summary:Garren primarily contributed to the Fauxton web UI for CouchDB, with a focus on enhancing the database user experience. They added support for installing Fauxton as a CouchApp, implementing a logging module for CouchDB logs, and integrating the ability to view, edit, and delete features. These changes included adding new code and UI elements.
erlangnetwork-clientjavascriptapachebig-data
apache/couchdb-documentation
Sep 2016 - May 2020
Apache CouchDB Documentation
Role in this project:Technical Writer
Technical WriterContributions:31 commits, 18 PRs, 23 pushes in 3 years 8 months
Contributions summary:Garren's contributions primarily focus on improving the documentation for the Apache CouchDB project. They added documentation for cluster setup, including API endpoints, configuration, and pagination, detailing how to configure and manage the CouchDB cluster. The user also updated the documentation for the mango API and added documentation for the X-Frame-Options and Prefer: return=minimal headers.
erlangnetwork-clientjavascriptapachebig-data
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