Rick Spurgeon
Principal Developer Advocate
Chicago, Illinois, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolRick Spurgeon is a Principal Developer Advocate at Kong with over 20 years of experience designing and shipping software across FinTech, electronic trading, and event stream processing. He blends deep systems and architecture expertise—developed leading trading technology and low-latency systems roles at firms like DV Trading and Trading Technologies—with a developer-facing focus helping teams integrate APIs and streaming platforms. At Confluent he worked hands-on in Kafka demo and tooling repos, contributing DevOps changes that improve reproducible, secure demo environments. Based in Chicago, he pairs technical leadership with practical engineering: driving integrations, mentoring teams, and translating complex distributed systems into clear developer workflows. Notably, he combines trader experience and architecture chops, giving him an uncommon perspective on latency, reliability, and real-time data pipelines.
11 years of coding experience
19 years of employment as a software developer
BS Business, Management Information Systems, General, BS Business, Management Information Systems, General at Kansas State University
Stackoverflow
111reputation
7kreached
2answers
0questions
Github Skills (17)
kafka-connect10
docker10
bash10
dockers10
scripting9
automation9
confluent-platform9
automations9
shell9
script9
sh9
yaml8
security8
kafka7
apache-kafka6
Programming languages (15)
Github contributions (5)
confluentinc/cp-demo
Jul 2019 - Feb 2022
Confluent Platform Demo including Apache Kafka, ksqlDB, Control Center, Schema Registry, Security, Schema Linking, and Cluster Linking
Role in this project:
DevOps Engineer
DevOps EngineerContributions:54 reviews, 85 commits, 37 PRs in 2 years 7 months
Contributions summary:Rick primarily focused on modifying the `submit_replicator_config.sh` script to disable the provenance header in a Kafka Connect configuration. They also made several commits related to merging different branches, upgrading versions, and updating documentation files. Their work also includes changes to the `start.sh` script and other scripts involved in setting up and configuring the demo environment.
linkingconfluent-platformkafka-connectapache-kafkasasl
rspurgeon/dots
Apr 2022 - Mar 2025
Notes on setting up my dev environment
Contributions:2 PRs, 26 pushes, 1 branch in 2 years 10 months
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