Ian Barfield
That Guy With All Those Books
Virginia, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolIan Barfield is a pragmatic senior software engineer with 13 years of experience specializing in distributed systems, probabilistic data structures, and performance-driven tooling. He excelled at AddThis refactoring and low-level optimizations, including notable work on HyperLogLogPlus for stream summarization and cardinality estimation in a widely used open-source library. Comfortable tracing problems end-to-end across heterogeneous server fleets, he enjoys eliminating tedious workflows by optimizing internal tools or removing entire projects. Brief stints at Oracle and prolonged hands-on ownership at AddThis reflect a blend of enterprise constraints and startup-style engineering freedom. Based in Virginia, he favors empirical, tenacious problem-solving over marketing polish and admits to being better at debugging code than making small talk.
13 years of coding experience
3 years of employment as a software developer
Computer Science, Computer Science at George Mason University
Github Skills (9)
algorithm10
data-structures10
javas10
algorithms10
data-structure10
java10
serialization9
performance-optimization9
data-serialization9
Programming languages (4)
Github contributions (5)
addthis/stream-lib
Jan 2013 - Oct 2015
Stream summarizer and cardinality estimator.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:47 commits, 2 PRs, 6 pushes in 2 years 8 months
Contributions summary:Ian primarily focused on refactoring and optimizing the `HyperLogLogPlus` class, a core component for stream summarization and cardinality estimation. Their contributions include bug fixes, performance improvements, and enhancements related to delta encoding. Additionally, they addressed concurrency issues and refactored serialization logic, further refining the library's functionality and efficiency.
pythoncardinalitymachine-learningsummarizerstream
addthis/ssync
Sep 2013 - Feb 2016
Contributions:4 commits, 2 PRs, 1 push in 2 years 4 months
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