Paul Smith
Principal Consultant at EverestEngineering
Melbourne, Victoria, Australia
Summary
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SeniorPaul Smith is a Principal Consultant and technology evangelist based in Melbourne with 23 years of experience designing and optimizing high-performance, high-reliability Java web applications and distributed data platforms. He has led architecture and engineering teams at Aconex and Oracle and now consults through Everest Engineering, bringing deep expertise in JVM performance, messaging, search and big-data stacks (Hadoop, HBase, Cassandra). A long-standing Apache member and contributor, Paul has directly improved the widely used Log4j 1.x codebase with parser enhancements, bug fixes and new pattern converters—demonstrating hands-on impact on core open-source infrastructure. He combines pragmatic systems thinking with low-level tuning skills across databases (MS SQL, Postgres, Oracle, MySQL), servlet containers and observability tooling, and is known for turning performance bottlenecks into measurable business improvements.
22 years of coding experience
24 years of employment as a software developer
Stackoverflow
287reputation
5kreached
2answers
4questions
Github Skills (13)
xml10
javas10
logging10
java10
jmx8
multithreading7
jenkins6
elasticsearch6
maven6
jfreechart6
file-access6
jvm6
security6
Programming languages (9)
Github contributions (5)
apache/logging-log4j1
Jun 2003 - Aug 2008
Apache log4j1
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:456 commits in 5 years 2 months
Contributions summary:Paul primarily contributed to the Apache Log4j 1.x code base, adding new functionality to the XMLDecoder class by adding the ability to extract XML document events. They also added support for a custom Properties and Stacktrace pattern converter. Furthermore, this user also fixed bugs in the JMX code, improved the efficiency of the sorting algorithm, and added a mechanism to view and manage the hidden loggers.
log4jjavaloggingapache
performancecopilot/parfait
Dec 2010 - Feb 2022
A Java performance monitoring library, exposing and collecting metrics through a variety of outputs
Contributions:6 reviews, 99 commits, 30 PRs in 11 years 4 months
performance-monitoringjava-performanceoutputsperformancecollecting
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