Hans Kao
Senior Manager, Product Design at IBM
Canada
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolHans Kao is a senior product design leader with 14 years of experience shaping intuitive, experiment-driven products in complex domains and currently leading design at IBM and HashiCorp. He blends systems engineering training from Waterloo with hands-on engineering sensibilities—evident in open-source contributions to projects like HashiCorp Consul, Raft, and memberlist—bringing a pragmatic understanding of distributed systems and dev tooling to product decisions. Known for mentoring teams in lean agile design practices, Hans connects user needs to business outcomes through measurable experiments and clear roadmaps. He has a track record of shipping features that enable containerized and distributed deployments (e.g., Consul advertise_addrs) and improving reliability in critical infrastructure libraries.
14 years of coding experience
7 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor of Applied Science Systems Design Engineering, Bachelor of Applied Science Systems Design Engineering at University of Waterloo
Github Skills (42)
typhoeus10
statsd10
scripting10
testing10
rspec10
http10
command-line-interface10
configuration-management10
bash10
distributed-systems10
rails10
httpc10
networking10
mongodb-database10
ruby10
Programming languages (11)
Github contributions (5)
typhoeus/typhoeus
May 2012 - May 2020
Typhoeus wraps libcurl in order to make fast and reliable requests.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:620 commits, 57 PRs, 78 pushes in 8 years 1 month
Contributions summary:Hans's commits primarily focused on core functionality within the `typhoeus/typhoeus` repository. Contributions involved modifications to existing request and easy class functionality, including the addition of `cache_key_basis` for overriding the cache key basis. The user also made changes related to authentication, the handling of response headers, and incorporated improvements to the code's structure and maintainability. They also addressed potential issues within the project's build system such as dependency management and the test server setup.
libcurlwrapsphptyphoeusreliable
hashicorp/raft
Dec 2014 - Jun 2020
Golang implementation of the Raft consensus protocol
Role in this project:Backend Developer
Backend DeveloperContributions:1 release, 4 reviews, 19 commits in 5 years 7 months
Contributions summary:Hans primarily focused on enhancing the `raft` consensus protocol implementation. Their contributions involved improving the codebase's resilience through the use of `MkdirAll` and adding comprehensive unit tests, demonstrating a focus on code quality and robustness. Additionally, the user implemented leadership transfer functionality, a core component of the Raft protocol, involving state management and RPC interactions. They also worked on code refactoring to use `TempDir` and addressed issues related to configuration changes and snapshot restoration.
golangraft-consensusraft-consensus-algorithmconsensus-protocolconsensus
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