Matt Foley
Founder And Volunteer Director at The Apache Software Foundation
California, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolMatt Foley is a software veteran and founder with over two decades of experience designing large-scale systems, leading engineering teams, and driving open-source projects from prototype to production. He served as a Hadoop HDFS committer and PMC member—serving as release manager for Hadoop 1.0—and later contributed significant fixes and testing to Apache Metron and Hadoop, demonstrating deep expertise in Big Data storage and cybersecurity tooling. At companies including Apple, Hortonworks, Yahoo, and Adobe he built and scaled release engineering, quality engineering, and distributed storage platforms, often creating the QE/RE processes that enabled reliable, automated production deployments. He also founded the OpenKilowatt Institute to tackle practical, cost-sensitive energy and storage challenges, blending technical rigor with civic-minded open collaboration. Based in California, Matt combines hands-on backend development, systems architecture, and committer-level open-source impact with a long-term focus on robustness and automation.
15 years of coding experience
37 years of employment as a software developer
M.S. Computer Engineering, M.S. Computer Engineering at Santa Clara UniversityB.S. Physics, B.S. Physics at Stanford University
Github Skills (21)
filesystem10
testing10
apache-hadoop10
java10
javas10
fileio10
file-processing10
file-handling10
stellar10
error-handling10
file-access10
amazon-elasticsearch9
hbase9
configuration-management9
aws-elasticsearch9
Programming languages (4)
Github contributions (5)
apache/metron
Jan 2017 - Jan 2018
Apache Metron
Role in this project:
Full-stack Developer
Full-stack DeveloperContributions:35 commits, 44 PRs, 434 comments in 11 months
Contributions summary:Matt contributed significantly to the Apache Metron project, specifically focusing on the Metron Profiler client. They implemented tests for the PROFILE_GET Stellar function, including config override capabilities to handle differing configurations. Furthermore, the user fixed javadoc doclint errors and addressed bugs in the MPack deployment and ES configurations. They also improved the site documentation.
javametronapache
apache/hadoop
Jun 2011 - Mar 2019
Apache Hadoop
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:360 commits, 2 PRs, 13 comments in 7 years 10 months
Contributions summary:Matt contributed to the Apache Hadoop project by adding utility APIs within the `FileUtil` class to improve error handling and avoid potential null pointer exceptions when working with files and directories. They added an `listFiles` method to handle cases where `File.listFiles()` returns null, and also created a `list` method that does similar handling for `File.list()`. These additions improved the robustness of the file system operations by handling potential I/O errors more gracefully and added test cases to ensure correct behavior. Additionally, they addressed command name handling issues within the file system shell.
apachebig-datasparkhadoopjava
Find and Hire Top DevelopersWe’ve analyzed the programming source code of over 60 million software developers on GitHub and scored them by 50,000 skills. Sign-up on Prog,AI to search for software developers.