Michael Allman
Los Angeles, California, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolMichael Allman is a principal software engineer with 14–15 years of experience designing high-throughput server and data platforms, specializing in Apache Spark production systems that ingest hundreds of millions of records per hour. He led development of Flint, an on-demand Spark cluster deployment service that enables interactive data science and elastic analytics in the cloud. Michael is an active open-source contributor to Apache Spark—several of his commits addressed partition handling, Parquet pruning, and metadata caching and were highlighted by Databricks as key to Spark 2.1. His contributions extend beyond big data into tooling and libraries, including improvements to image metadata handling in Exiv2 and database features in the popular GRDB.swift project. With an academic background in mathematics from UMBC and Oxford, he brings rigorous problem decomposition and performance-first engineering to distributed systems. Outside work he pursues photography, travel, cooking, and Mac app development in Swift, reflecting a blend of technical craft and creative interests.
14 years of coding experience
MSc, Mathematics and The Foundations of Computer Science, MSc, Mathematics and The Foundations of Computer Science at University of OxfordUMBC
Github Skills (21)
c-language10
sqlite10
admin10
exif10
metadata10
database-administration10
image-data10
sql10
database-design10
swift10
cprogramming-language10
image-processing9
testing9
databases9
database9
Programming languages (16)
Github contributions (5)
Exiv2/exiv2
Feb 2022 - Mar 2022
Image metadata library and tools
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:1 review, 7 commits, 9 PRs in 18 days
Contributions summary:Michael primarily contributed to the `exiv2` library by modifying and improving its handling of image metadata, particularly for Nikon cameras. Their work involved refactoring code related to Nikon AF2 metadata, changing data types, and adjusting internal logic for version selection. They also focused on fixing a bug and ensuring correct output for certain metadata values, specifically "ContrastDetectAFInFocus". These changes show a solid understanding of image metadata standards and low-level code.
exif-metadataexifiptcimage-metadataexif-interface
groue/GRDB.swift
Oct 2020 - Dec 2021
A toolkit for SQLite databases, with a focus on application development
Role in this project:Back-end Developer & Database Engineer
Back-end Developer & Database EngineerContributions:6 reviews, 12 commits, 1 PR in 1 year 2 months
Contributions summary:Michael primarily contributed to the GRDB Swift library, focusing on database features and enhancements. Their work includes adding support for generated columns, which involves modifying the table definition API and the underlying database query logic. They also worked on the incremental backup functionality, refactoring the API to allow for progress reporting. The user further improved the test suite, refactoring and adding tests for generated columns and backup functionalities.
sqlite-databasessql-buildergrdbsqlsqlite3
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