Reynold Xin

San Francisco, California, United States

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Summary

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Rockstar

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Top School

Reynold Xin is a seasoned software engineer with 15 years of experience building high-performance distributed data systems and developer tools from San Francisco. He holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from UC Berkeley and a BASc in Engineering Science from the University of Toronto, blending rigorous academic research with production-grade engineering. Reynold has been a significant contributor to Apache Spark—adding closure serializer configurability and storage-layer improvements—and helped bring pandas-like ergonomics to Spark through work on Koalas. His contributions span backend systems, test automation, and full-stack website and packaging work, showing a rare comfort across core engine code, developer UX, and docs. Colleagues know him for pragmatic performance-driven changes that improve scalability and operational clarity rather than flashy features. Outside core commits he often focuses on tooling and packaging that make big-data technology more accessible to other engineers.

15 years of coding experience

Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.), Computer Science, Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.), Computer Science at University of California, Berkeley

BASc, Engineering Science, BASc, Engineering Science at University of Toronto

Stackoverflow

Stats

1,786reputation

193kreached

20answers

10questions

Github Skills (44)

unit-testing10

apache-spark10

content-management-system10

maintenance10

python10

testing10

css10

dataframes10

pandas10

big-data10

time-series10

data-serialization10

spark-streaming10

java10

dataframe10

Programming languages (9)

TypeScriptJavaRCScalaJavaScriptHTMLRuby

Github contributions (5)

apache/spark-website

Jul 2014 - Oct 2018

Apache Spark Website

Role in this project:

Full-stack Developer

Contributions:70 commits, 5 PRs, 15 comments in 4 years 4 months

Contributions summary:Reynold primarily focused on updating the Apache Spark website, particularly the download and community pages. They fixed broken links, added sort benchmark news items, and updated the documentation links. They also updated the website's content, including FAQs, documentation, and related projects. These changes suggest involvement in both front-end and back-end website maintenance and content updates.

pythonsqlapachebig-dataspark

mesos/spark

Mar 2012 - Dec 2013

Lightning-fast cluster computing in Java, Scala and Python.

Role in this project:

Back-end Developer

Contributions:298 commits in 1 year 8 months

Contributions summary:Reynold's commits primarily revolve around enhancements and modifications to the Spark codebase. The user added a feature to specify the serializer for closures via the `spark.closure.serializer` configuration option and subsequently integrated this serializer into the `SparkEnv` and executor task processing. Furthermore, the user implemented changes to the storage layer, including the introduction of a `DiskBlockObjectWriter` for writing shuffle output data and the ability for a worker to inform the master about block removal, indicating contributions focused on data processing and system performance.

pythoncluster-computinglightningsparkscala

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