Olaf Alders

Old Toronto, Ontario, Canada

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Summary

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Rockstar

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Top School

Olaf 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.

17 years of coding experience

University of Toronto

English, German, Greek, Latin, german, middle high (ca.1050-1500)

Stackoverflow

Stats

5,259reputation

237kreached

87answers

25questions

Badges

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)

C#CMakefileGoHTMLTypeScriptPerl6Shell

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

Contributions:90 reviews, 1014 commits, 426 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.

apieverythingpythonmetacpanperl

metacpan/metacpan-web

May 2011 - Jan 2023

Web interface for MetaCPAN

Role in this project:

Back-end Developer

Contributions:290 reviews, 1093 commits, 640 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.

cpanmetacpanperlweb-interface

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