Jakob Homan
Seattle, Washington, United States
Summary
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RockstarJakob Homan is a distributed systems infrastructure engineer and team leader based in Seattle with 16 years of experience building data and data-infra teams for startups and medium-sized companies. He focuses on architecting and extending open-source, high-throughput data platforms rather than traditional ETL work, and has deep hands-on experience in the Apache big data ecosystem. As a committer and PMC member on projects like Hadoop, Kafka, Samza and Giraph, he has driven core refactors, performance improvements, input-format implementations, and security fixes—including Kerberos-related enhancements. He prefers working with organizations that value healthy engineering culture and impact-driven missions, and is selective about outreach, encouraging specificity in contact. Jakob is especially interested in Seattle and UK startup communities and brings a pragmatic combination of leadership, OSS stewardship, and low-level systems craftsmanship. An understated strength: he routinely tackles subtle correctness and security edge cases that keep distributed systems reliable at scale.
16 years of coding experience
norse, old, English, English
Stackoverflow
2,284reputation
254kreached
36answers
3questions
hive
top-1%
hadoop
top-1%
Github Skills (25)
algorithm10
algorithms10
graph-algorithms10
filesystem10
kerberos10
testing10
apache-hadoop10
big-data10
hadoop10
data-structure10
java10
giraph10
security10
javas10
hive10
Programming languages (13)
Github contributions (5)
apache/giraph
Aug 2011 - Aug 2012
Mirror of Apache Giraph
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:76 commits in 11 months
Contributions summary:Jakob primarily focused on refactoring and enhancing the Apache Giraph project's core functionality. They addressed a critical bug by correcting a method call within vertex processing logic. Further contributions included refactoring the `BspServiceWorker::loadVertices()` method to improve efficiency. They also implemented several input formats including Adjacency List and JSON formats for graph data, and improved performance, and maintained the core system's functionality and ensured it met project requirements.
giraphjavabig-data
ekoontz/hadoop-common
Nov 2009 - Nov 2012
Mirror of Apache Hadoop common
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:88 commits in 3 years
Contributions summary:Jakob primarily focused on bug fixes and enhancements within the Hadoop common repository. Their contributions addressed issues related to Umask parsing, log levels, and file context operations. They also implemented changes to improve Kerberos security, including adding token identifiers and a workaround for cross-realm principal resolution, demonstrating a strong understanding of Hadoop's security features.
apache-hadoop
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