Gerben Stavenga
Software Engineer at Zeromatter
San Francisco Bay Area United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolGerben Stavenga is a software engineer with nine years of industry experience and a PhD in theoretical and mathematical physics, now based in the San Francisco Bay Area. He has a track record of optimizing high-performance systems—from improving Google's protobuf decoding and memory management to building Ethereum-based financial market simulations at Futureswap. His work spans backend performance engineering, network and compression stacks, and low-level parsing optimizations that have contributed to widely used open-source projects like protocolbuffers/protobuf. Comfortable moving between research-grade numerical code and production systems, he brings a physics-rooted rigor to profiling, algorithmic refactors, and scalable system design. Currently at Zeromatter after a stint at Aptos Labs, he combines deep technical troubleshooting with a history of pushing performance boundaries in both academia and industry.
9 years of coding experience
15 years of employment as a software developer
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) Theoretical and Mathematical Physics, Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) Theoretical and Mathematical Physics at Utrecht University
English, Dutch
Stackoverflow
1reputation
0reached
0answers
0questions
Github Skills (14)
data-serialization10
c-language10
cprogramming-language10
performance-optimization10
protobuf10
protocol-buffers10
serialization10
data-structure9
struct9
data-structures9
marshalling7
build-automation7
git7
cmake7
Programming languages (3)
Github contributions (5)
protocolbuffers/protobuf
Sep 2016 - Feb 2021
Protocol Buffers - Google's data interchange format
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer & Performance Engineer
Back-end Developer & Performance EngineerContributions:12 reviews, 4 PRs, 3 pushes in 4 years 5 months
Contributions summary:Gerben focused on optimizing the performance of the protocol buffers library. They implemented destructors for default instances, and refactored code for more efficient parsing, including a simplified varint parse loop and improved tag dispatch. Further contributions involved fixing bugs within the fast decoding implementation and adding support for repeated varints, alongside addressing build issues. These changes likely improved memory management and decoding speeds within the core library.
protocol-buffersrpcgoogle-protocol-buffersinterchange-formatmarshalling
gerben-s/protobuf
Nov 2016 - Feb 2021
Protocol Buffers - Google's data interchange format
Contributions:14 pushes, 1 branch in 4 years 3 months
protocol-buffersgoogle-protocol-buffersinterchange-formatprotobufbuffers
Find and Hire Top DevelopersWe’ve analyzed the programming source code of over 60 million software developers on GitHub and scored them by 50,000 skills. Sign-up on Prog,AI to search for software developers.