Håvard Ottestad
Senior Software Engineer at HASMAC AS
Oslo, Norway
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolHåvard Ottestad is a Senior Software Engineer in Oslo with 13 years of experience specializing in high-performance graph and semantic technologies, particularly Java/JVM-based systems. He has a strong track record contributing to Eclipse RDF4J—implementing and optimizing SHACL and RDFS components—and has built production semantic stacks using SPARQL, OWL and JSON-LD. Håvard thrives on continuous performance improvements, preferring code that is measurably faster today than yesterday, and brings practical expertise from roles in government tech, consultancy, and now Bloomberg. He mentors and leads technical efforts (including Google Summer of Code mentorship) and also serves as chair of HASMAC AS, blending hands-on engineering with governance. Equally curious and cautious about new AI trends, he pairs a healthy skepticism of LLMs with pragmatic use where they add value.
13 years of coding experience
2 years of employment as a software developer
Master of Science (M.Sc.), Informatics - Distributed Systems and Networks, Master of Science (M.Sc.), Informatics - Distributed Systems and Networks at University of OsloInternational Baccalaureate, International Baccalaureate at UWC Red Cross Nordic
Github Skills (6)
javas10
data-validation10
java10
rdf9
sparql9
testing8
Programming languages (14)
Github contributions (5)
eclipse-rdf4j/rdf4j
Nov 2016 - Jan 2023
Eclipse RDF4J: scalable RDF for Java
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:26 releases, 680 reviews, 1943 commits in 6 years 3 months
Contributions summary:The user, Håvard Ottestad, was primarily focused on enhancing the RDF4J project by implementing and integrating new features, refactoring existing functionality, and performing code cleanup. The commits indicate significant contributions to the SHACL (Shapes Constraint Language) module, including work on supporting and validating various constraints within the graph and query processing functionality. The contributions included optimizations to performance.
scalablerdf4jlinked-datatriplestoresparql
AcandoNorway/XmlToRdf
Jul 2016 - Aug 2021
Fast and configurable XML to RDF converter for Java
Contributions:3 releases, 32 PRs, 80 pushes in 5 years 2 months
configurablexmlrdfjavaxslt
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