Michael F
Engineering Manager at Kong Inc.
Florida, United States
Summary
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RockstarMichael F is an Engineering Manager at Kong with over 18 years of software engineering experience, including deep roots in Department of Defense modeling and simulation and 7+ years of remote leadership. He blends hands-on expertise in cross-platform C/C++, Go, Lua, Java, and PHP with practical DevOps know-how across CI/CD systems like GitHub Actions, Jenkins, TravisCI and AppVeyor. A prolific open-source contributor, he has improved critical projects such as the DataStax C/C++ and PHP drivers—refactoring cluster-management bridges, removing heavyweight dependencies, and hardening Cassandra compatibility—and contributed stability and rate-limiting fixes to the widely used Kong API Gateway. Known for pragmatic refactors that reduce complexity (for example removing Boost and streamlining SSH and Redis logic), he excels at shipping robust, maintainable systems and increasing test coverage. Based in Florida, he pairs systems-level thinking with a developer-first approach to mentor teams and deliver production-grade infrastructure.
12 years of coding experience
Github Skills (28)
unit-testing10
api-management10
c-language10
rate-limiting10
cassandra10
datatypes10
redis10
testing10
lua10
php10
api-gateway10
cprogramming-language10
clustering10
cassandra-database10
reverse-proxy9
Programming languages (10)
Github contributions (5)
datastax/php-driver
Jul 2015 - Aug 2017
[MAINTENANCE ONLY] DataStax PHP Driver for Apache Cassandra
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer & QA Engineer
Back-end Developer & QA EngineerContributions:17 commits, 45 PRs, 170 pushes in 2 years
Contributions summary:Michael primarily focused on testing and improving the DataStax PHP Driver for Apache Cassandra. Their contributions include adding tests to retrieve column types and handle custom types, fixing a driver crash related to schema metadata, and adding duration type to data provider. Additionally, the user addressed issues with Bigint creation using strings, increasing test coverage, and updating the build configurations. They also worked on improving the documentation.
cassandradatastaxdriverphp
apache/cassandra-cpp-driver
Jun 2015 - May 2020
C/C++ Driver for Apache Cassandra®
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:5 releases, 177 commits, 166 PRs in 4 years 11 months
Contributions summary:Michael's commits primarily focused on refactoring the CCM bridge, a critical component for managing and interacting with Apache Cassandra clusters. This included removing dependencies (Boost), simplifying SSH command execution, addressing memory leaks, and enhancing the bridge's capabilities for cluster status checks and local command execution. A major contribution involved enabling the use of GitHub versions of Cassandra, along with speed improvements for switching implementations. The user also added a whitelist load balancing policy.
cassandracppdriver
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