Jonathan Dance
Software Engineer at hydradatabase
Austin, Texas, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolJonathan Dance is a seasoned software leader and founder with 18 years of experience building scalable cloud-native systems and high-performing teams. As Co-founder & CTO of Hydra and a former engineering leader at Heroku/Salesforce, he blends hands-on development in Rust, C, Go, Ruby, and TypeScript with strategic product and operational leadership. He has led global teams from early-stage product design through enterprise-grade support and compliance (HIPAA/PCI), growing support orgs from single digits to dozens while introducing data-driven tooling and self-service platforms. Technically hands-on, he architected a Postgres extension (Hydra Columnar) accepted into Y Combinator and regularly contributes to notable open-source projects like Heroku buildpacks, resque, and rack-timeout. Comfortable toggling between code, architecture, and people management, he’s known for improving delivery velocity without sacrificing quality through CI/CD, observability, and strong engineering processes. Based in Austin, he combines operator experience with a pragmatic builder’s curiosity—often stepping into code during critical releases.
18 years of coding experience
9 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor of Science (B.Sc.) Computer Science, Bachelor of Science (B.Sc.) Computer Science at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
Github Skills (28)
ruby-rails10
worker-process10
postgresql10
background-process10
testing10
background-processing10
process-management10
rails10
asynchronous-tasks10
database-administration10
background-worker10
queuing10
ruby10
system-calls10
heroku10
Programming languages (15)
Github contributions (5)
zombocom/rack-timeout
Jun 2013 - Mar 2020
Abort requests that are taking too long
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer & QA Engineer
Back-end Developer & QA EngineerContributions:13 reviews, 41 commits, 36 PRs in 6 years 10 months
Contributions summary:Jonathan primarily focused on improving the reliability and maintainability of the `rack-timeout` library. Their contributions include refactoring test code, adding new test cases to cover various scenarios, and addressing warnings to ensure code quality. Furthermore, they made adjustments to the core logic, such as fixing a precision issue related to timestamp calculations, and handled environment variable defaults.
sinatrarackmhealthlongabort
hydradatabase/columnar
Aug 2022 - Jan 2023
Postgres-native columnar storage extension
Role in this project:Database Engineer / Database Administrator
Database Engineer / Database AdministratorContributions:7 releases, 79 reviews, 42 commits in 5 months
Contributions summary:Jonathan primarily focused on configuring and testing the `hydradatabase/columnar` PostgreSQL extension. Their commits include setting up background workers for pg_cron, implementing cron tests and fixes, and renaming database components. Additionally, the user modified configuration files to increase work memory and adjusted TCP keepalive settings. They also made modifications to the acceptance tests.
datawarehousepostgresql-extensionsqlolapsnowflake
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