Richard Zowalla
Postdoctoral Research Associate
Heilbronn, Baden-Württemberg, Germany
Summary
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Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolRichard Zowalla is a research software engineer and postdoctoral researcher with a decade of experience building distributed, AI-accelerated web crawling and NLP systems. Based in Heilbronn, he leads development of SPIDERWISE at Fraunhofer IAO and teaches advanced programming and AI-assisted QA while managing faculty CI/CD and virtualization infrastructure. An active Apache Software Foundation member and committer across projects like OpenNLP, TomEE and Storm, he brings practical expertise in test automation, dependency modernization, and scalable back-end/DevOps pipelines. He co-founded Colorful Bytes GmbH and maintains deep open-source credentials—having hardened OpenNLP tests for Windows 11/Java 17 and added CI integration for Apache Storm—demonstrating a rare blend of academic rigor (Dr.sc.hum in Medical Informatics) and production-grade engineering.
10 years of coding experience
11 years of employment as a software developer
Doctor scientiarum humanarum (Dr.sc.hum), Medical Informatics, summa cum laude, Doctor scientiarum humanarum (Dr.sc.hum), Medical Informatics, summa cum laude at Ruprecht-Karls-Universität HeidelbergMaster of Science - MSc, Medical Informatics, Master of Science - MSc, Medical Informatics at Heidelberg University
Stackoverflow
5,686reputation
218kreached
105answers
18questions
java
top-5%
Github Skills (28)
jakartaee10
dependency-management10
apache-storm10
testing10
zookeeper10
java10
javas10
junit10
filter10
filtering10
nlp10
github-ci9
cicd9
jtest9
githubaction-workflow9
Programming languages (17)
Github contributions (5)
apache/tomee
Sep 2018 - Jan 2023
Apache TomEE
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:3 releases, 205 reviews, 447 commits in 4 years 5 months
Contributions summary:Richard primarily contributed to the Apache TomEE project by implementing and testing features related to JSON-B provider configuration, including date format, locale, and access mode. They added new features to the `TomEEJsonbProvider` class, created corresponding test cases for custom configurations, and integrated these changes. They also merged upstream changes and updated dependencies related to DBCP and Quartz scheduler within the TomEE project.
microprofileapachetomeenetwork-serverjakarta-ee
kennycason/kumo
Mar 2017 - Sep 2019
Kumo - Java Word Cloud
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:11 commits, 4 PRs, 27 comments in 2 years 6 months
Contributions summary:Richard primarily contributed to the Java-based word cloud project, focusing on core functionalities such as word frequency analysis, filtering, and normalization. Their commits show refactoring efforts to externalize dependencies and the introduction of Java 8 features. They also modified and added tests to ensure the project's functionality and robustness. Additionally, the user made code changes related to the CLI interface.
kumowordcloudcloudword-cloudjava
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