John Sherman
Staff Engineer at Google
California, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolJohn Sherman is a Staff Engineer with nine years of professional experience building high-performance backend systems and distributed databases from startup to enterprise scale. Based in California, he has driven core engine and storage work at Cloudera and TransLattice and now leads infrastructure efforts at Google. He is an expert in query engines and data platforms, contributing significant backend features and bug fixes to prominent Apache projects like Impala and Hive—adding external frontend support, CTAS staging, and query-profiling hooks. Known as a pragmatic problem-solver, he routinely hunts down elusive bugs with low-level debugging and profiling, and has implemented critical components such as shard control, shared-memory messaging, and concurrent storage maps. He combines deep systems craftsmanship with product-focused delivery, able to move between prototyping and production hardening. Outside the obvious, he frequently surfaces performance and reliability wins by reworking state machines and recovery logic that most teams would consider too risky to touch.
9 years of coding experience
17 years of employment as a software developer
The Ohio State University
Github Skills (23)
c-language10
back-end-development10
java10
javas10
hive10
sql10
apache-hive10
thrift10
cprogramming-language10
impala10
hadoop9
python9
big-data9
databases9
database9
Programming languages (4)
Github contributions (5)
apache/hive
Sep 2019 - Jan 2023
Apache Hive
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:69 reviews, 26 commits, 22 PRs in 3 years 3 months
Contributions summary:John primarily contributed to the Apache Hive project, focusing on bug fixes and enhancements related to query execution and metastore operations. Their work includes addressing NullPointerExceptions in explain plans, fixing issues with dynamic partitioning, and improving the handling of Thrift structures. Additionally, the user was involved in refactoring and optimizations within the codebase.
apache-hivehivejavadatabasesql
apache/impala
Apr 2020 - Apr 2021
Apache Impala
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:6 commits in 1 year
Contributions summary:John implemented features to support an external frontend service port for Impala. Their work focused on modifying the Impala server to expose a new service port compatible with HiveServer2. The user added options to the `start-impala-cluster.py` script and modified the `impalad_coordinator Dockerfile`. They also added support for external frontend CTAS operations including managing the staging directory and partition depths, which allows external frontends to manage the result files. Further modifications included adding support for a frontend supplied timeline to assist in query profiling.
impala
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