Pål Johansen
Senior Developer at Varnish Software Group
Oslo, Norway
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolPål Johansen is a Senior Developer based in Oslo with 10 years of professional software engineering experience and a PhD-level academic background from the University of Oslo. He has been driving core backend work at Varnish Software since 2016, contributing significant improvements to the Varnish Cache project and the Hitch TLS proxy—work that spans performance tuning, protocol support (ALPN/NPN, PROXYv2) and security hardening. Prior roles include research scientist and academic posts, reflecting a strong foundation in research-driven engineering and system design. Comfortable in low-level, systems-oriented code, he combines rigorous documentation and release preparation with hands-on optimizations that improve real-world proxy and caching behavior. An understated strength is his blend of long-term maintenance mindset and proactive feature work, keeping critical open-source infrastructure robust and secure.
10 years of coding experience
8 years of employment as a software developer
PhD, PhD at University of Oslo
Stackoverflow
1reputation
0reached
0answers
0questions
Github Skills (16)
c1710
version-control10
caching10
git10
ss10
http10
sslv310
alpn10
ssl10
reverse-proxy10
c1110
performance-optimization10
openssl10
security10
documentation9
Programming languages (7)
Github contributions (5)
varnishcache/varnish-cache
Mar 2016 - Sep 2022
Varnish Cache source code repository
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:12 reviews, 128 commits, 80 PRs in 6 years 7 months
Contributions summary:Pål contributed to the Varnish Cache project by implementing and improving core functionality. They updated the "Via" header, modified code related to object handling, and optimized ban operations. The user also addressed documentation issues, updating the user guide and changelogs to reflect recent code changes and new features. Furthermore, they prepared the codebase for future releases and adjusted system parameters to enhance performance and functionality.
cachingreverse-proxycode-repositorycachevarnish-cache
varnish/hitch
Jun 2016 - Nov 2016
A scalable TLS proxy by Varnish Software.
Role in this project:Back-end Developer & Security Engineer
Back-end Developer & Security EngineerContributions:27 commits, 3 PRs, 12 pushes in 5 months
Contributions summary:Pål primarily contributed to the security and functionality of the Hitch TLS proxy by addressing vulnerabilities and improving code quality. They removed unused functions, implemented format string checking, and improved logging. Moreover, the user added support for TLS protocol selection, ALPN/NPN negotiation and integrated PROXY protocol version 2 support, enhancing Hitch's capabilities in handling different protocols and client connections.
scalablesslproxytlstls-proxy
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