Piotr Kołaczkowski
Staff Engineer at DataStax
Warsaw, Masovian Voivodeship, Poland
Summary
🤩
RockstarPiotr Kołaczkowski is a Staff Engineer based in Warsaw with 13 years of experience building distributed database and analytics platforms, currently shaping DataStax’s architecture and core engineering efforts. He blends deep research and academic experience—former university lecturer and assistant professor in database systems and text/web mining—with hands-on leadership delivering Spark-Cassandra integrations and DSE analytics. Daily coding in Rust and Java, he also dives into C++, C and assembly when performance or low-level control demand it, reflecting a pragmatic systems hacker mindset. An active open-source contributor, he helped integrate Gradle support into the popular Bloop build server and bootstrapped core functionality for the cassandra-spark connector, demonstrating fluency across build tooling and data connectors. His strengths lie in data indexing, file and database system design, and making complex distributed systems performant and maintainable. Notably, he pairs production-grade engineering with teaching and training experience, which helps him communicate complex architecture to diverse stakeholders.
13 years of coding experience
16 years of employment as a software developer
English, German, Polish
Stackoverflow
2,629reputation
163kreached
67answers
0questions
java
top-5%
cassandra
top-5%
Github Skills (21)
dependency-management10
apache-spark10
cassandra10
sbt10
java10
scala10
javas10
type-conversion10
build-tools10
gradlew10
gradle10
compiler-design9
test-framework8
testing8
tomcat6
Programming languages (14)
Github contributions (5)
apache/cassandra-spark-connector
Jun 2014 - Jan 2022
DataStax Connector for Apache Spark to Apache Cassandra
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:45 releases, 720 commits, 181 PRs in 7 years 8 months
Contributions summary:Piotr's contributions centered on the initial project setup and the implementation of core functionality within the cassandra-spark-connector. This involved establishing the project structure using sbt and integrating it with IntelliJ IDEA. The user implemented core features for loading Cassandra tables as RDDs and saving RDDs to Cassandra, including the development of essential type conversion mechanisms within the project. Furthermore, the user also renamed artifact name to `cassandra-driver-spark`, to be consistent with naming of other java driver modules.
cassandraconnectorsparkscaladatastax
scalacenter/bloop
Jul 2019 - Aug 2019
Bloop is a build server and CLI tool to compile, test and run Scala fast from any editor or build tool.
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:13 commits, 16 PRs, 86 comments in 1 month
Contributions summary:Piotr contributed to the Gradle integration of the Bloop build server, primarily focusing on importing build configurations and JVM options. They modified the Gradle integration to correctly import JVM platform options and system properties for testing. Additionally, the user addressed dependency management issues and improved the compile order in projects imported from Gradle, alongside performance optimizations.
build-serverproductivitycompilation-servercompiledeveloper-tools
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