Kirk True
Apache Kafka Committer at The Apache Software Foundation
Ben Lomond, California, United States
Summary
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Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolKirk True is an experienced software engineer and entrepreneur with over two decades of building high-throughput, scalable systems; he founded Mustard Grain to help companies handle large transaction and data volumes and has served marquee clients like Adobe, Apple, eBay, and LinkedIn. Currently a Staff Software Engineer at Confluent and an Apache Kafka Committer, he focuses on improving the Java Kafka client and has contributed bug fixes and security-conscious refinements (including OAuth bearer token and SASL handling) to the flagship apache/kafka project. His background blends hands-on backend engineering and architecture—from designing core APIs at Movaris to delivering high-traffic e-commerce platforms earlier in his career—giving him deep expertise in performance and resource generalization. Based in Ben Lomond, California, Kirk pairs entrepreneurial pragmatism with open-source stewardship, and is known for addressing subtle correctness issues (like proper equals/hashCode implementations) that prevent real-world failures.
11 years of coding experience
24 years of employment as a software developer
Computer Science, Computer Science at De Anza CollegeSan Lorenzo Valley High School
Stackoverflow
21reputation
310reached
0answers
1question
Github Skills (12)
javas10
kafka10
back-end-development10
sasl10
oauth10
java10
refactor9
refactoring9
junit8
jtest8
scala6
scripting6
Programming languages (6)
Github contributions (5)
apache/kafka
Jul 2022 - Jan 2023
Mirror of Apache Kafka
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:1155 reviews, 13 commits, 197 PRs in 6 months
Contributions summary:Kirk contributed to the OAuth bearer token refresh functionality within the Kafka project, focusing on resolving issues related to SASL extensions. They implemented `equals()` and `hashCode()` methods for `SaslExtensions` to ensure correct behavior, preventing duplicate entries in `Subject` public credentials. Additionally, the user addressed a bug in `HttpAccessTokenRetriever` by correcting the Base64 encoding method, and they removed logging of potentially sensitive information. The user also worked on the refactoring of the consumer, extracting metadata-related tasks and other inner classes.
apache-kafkakafka-consumerapachescalakafka
mustardgrain/docker-utils
Aug 2015 - Jan 2020
Simple Docker utilities
Contributions:4 PRs, 19 pushes, 7 branches in 4 years 6 months
docker
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