Nicholas Telford
Senior Software Engineer at DataSift
Reading, England, United Kingdom
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolNicholas Telford is a senior software engineer with 14 years' experience specialising in Scala and building distributed, large-scale data processing systems. Based in Reading, he has led teams and shipped high-throughput data products at DataSift—driving the Twitter Historics platform and later heading Managed Sources—and now works on performance and platform engineering at Meltwater. He contributes to major open-source projects including Apache Kafka (notably Streams API, RocksDB improvements and memory-leak fixes) and Dropwizard, showing a blend of production-grade backend work and tooling refinement. Comfortable across backend services, metrics and storage internals, he’s known for pragmatic system design and quietly improving observability and resource management in complex pipelines.
14 years of coding experience
Computer Science, Computer Science at University of Exeter
Github Skills (10)
dependency-management10
rocksdb10
dropwizard10
javas10
configuration-management10
logback10
java10
metric10
slf4j10
scala9
Programming languages (7)
Github contributions (5)
dropwizard/dropwizard
Mar 2012 - Jun 2014
A damn simple library for building production-ready RESTful web services.
Role in this project:
Backend Developer
Backend DeveloperContributions:166 commits in 2 years 3 months
Contributions summary:Nicholas primarily focused on updating the Dropwizard project's logging configuration and dependencies. They updated documentation and code to reflect the switch to Logback and refactored the project to utilize a consistent logging framework throughout, including database query logs. The user also made improvements to the Scala service initialization and added features such as validation constraints for `Duration` and `Size`. Furthermore, they worked on adding support for various metrics reporters.
production-readyweb-services-restfulrestful-webservicesjax-rsproduction
apache/kafka
Mar 2022 - Nov 2022
Mirror of Apache Kafka
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:109 reviews, 2 commits, 28 PRs in 8 months
Contributions summary:Nicholas contributed to Apache Kafka's core functionalities, specifically focusing on the Streams API. Their work involved implementing new configurations to control data purging in repartition topics, fixing an issue related to restoring records within RocksDB, and addressing block cache metrics. Furthermore, the user made improvements to RocksDB column family management and generalisation, and added metrics to track open iterators and iterator durations. They also contributed to fixing memory leaks.
apache-kafkakafka-consumerapachescalakafka
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