Rafer Hazen
Software Engineer at PlanetScale
Denver, Colorado, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolRafer Hazen is a software engineer with 13 years of experience building reliable, scalable systems and distributed databases, currently contributing at PlanetScale from Denver. His background includes engineering and leadership roles at GitHub—rising to Staff Engineering Manager—and principal-level work at Collective Intellect/Oracle, reflecting both hands-on development and team leadership. He has meaningful open-source contributions to Vitess, improving error handling, observability, and query engine reliability for a widely used MySQL clustering system. Comfortable across backend, database engineering, and operational metrics, he specializes in making complex distributed behaviors observable and robust. Trained at the University of Colorado Boulder, he pairs pragmatic engineering with an eye for measurable improvements in production systems.
14 years of coding experience
12 years of employment as a software developer
BS, Computer Science, BS, Computer Science at University of Colorado Boulder
Github Skills (12)
query-engine10
databases10
error-handling10
go10
mysql10
database10
sql-database9
relational-databases9
kubernetes8
kubernetes-pods8
sha7
cnc6
Programming languages (2)
Github contributions (5)
vitessio/vitess
Aug 2022 - Aug 2022
Vitess is a database clustering system for horizontal scaling of MySQL.
Role in this project:
Backend Developer & Database Engineer
Backend Developer & Database EngineerContributions:8 reviews, 1 commit, 7 PRs in 1 day
Contributions summary:Rafer primarily contributed to the backend logic and database aspects of the Vitess project. Their work involved modifying error handling mechanisms, specifically sanitizing and improving error messages, as seen in commits 1 and 3. They also added new metrics related to tablet types, modified query engine and tablet server code, and updated the code to improve the reliability of WaitForPos errors. Additionally, the user added functionalities like table and index metrics for the database, demonstrating database engineering skills.
clusteringdatabasehorizontal-scalingmysqlvitess
rafer/domain_model
Feb 2014 - May 2015
A minimal set of utilities for declaring object attributes with optional type and validation support
Contributions:38 commits, 3 pushes, 4 tags in 1 year 3 months
typescriptoptional-typevalidation
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