Olaf Alders
Old Toronto, Ontario, Canada
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolOlaf Alders is an experienced back-end engineer and community builder with 18 years of experience, best known as the founder and driving force behind MetaCPAN. He builds developer communities through open source, contributing core API and web functionality to widely used projects and expanding data coverage and searchability for CPAN. His contributions span languages and ecosystems—from PHP and Python GeoIP libraries to Go MaxMind DB tooling—where he focuses on reliability, test coverage, and practical feature additions like GeoLite2-ASN support. Based in Old Toronto, he also creates content and runs services such as prettygoodping.com for monitoring TLS certs, domains and uptime, reflecting a strong operational sensibility beyond coding.
18 years of coding experience
University of Toronto
English, German, Greek, Latin, german, middle high (ca.1050-1500)
Stackoverflow
5,259reputation
237kreached
87answers
25questions
perl
top-5%
Github Skills (35)
geoip10
back-end-development10
apidoc10
amazon-elasticsearch10
indexing10
perl10
cpan10
elasticsearchquery10
php10
go10
api10
aws-elasticsearch10
geolocation10
elasticsearch10
perl-module10
Programming languages (33)
Github contributions (5)
metacpan/metacpan-api
Nov 2010 - Jan 2023
A free, open API for everything you want to know about CPAN
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:107 reviews, 1014 commits, 434 PRs in 12 years 4 months
Contributions summary:Olaf primarily focused on enhancing the MetaCPAN API by implementing features to index and include data from various CPAN sources, including authors, modules, and CPAN ratings. Their work involved creating scripts to load author information, index modules and their associated POD documentation, incorporate data from cpanratings.perl.org, and add date stamps to the module index. These contributions extended the API's functionality to support searching and displaying more comprehensive information about CPAN modules and authors within the Elasticsearch index.
cpanopenapimetacpanperl
metacpan/metacpan-web
May 2011 - Jan 2023
Web interface for MetaCPAN
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:311 reviews, 1093 commits, 691 PRs in 11 years 9 months
Contributions summary:Olaf contributed to the core functionality of the MetaCPAN web interface, specifically improving the codebase and adding functionality. The user addressed issues by adding a `dist.ini` file to allow the use of `dzil listdeps` and modifying code in `MetaCPAN/Web/Controller.pm`, `MetaCPAN/Web/Controller/Search.pm`, and other files, indicating back-end development work. Further, the user made updates to improve author profiles and display information in the interface.
metacpanperlcpan
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