Rob Vesse
Principal Platform Engineer
Wellington, England, United Kingdom
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolRob Vesse is a Principal Platform Engineer with 15 years' experience integrating semantic graph technologies and big data ecosystems, currently leading platform development at Telicent. He combines deep research credentials—a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Southampton on Semantic Web link integrity—with hands-on engineering at Cray/HPE, where he helped build the Urika product line and work on exascale analytics. Rob is a seasoned contributor to major open-source projects, notably as an Apache Jena committer and a former founder of dotNetRDF, and has improved Kubernetes and CI deployments in projects like Apache Spark. He blends distributed-systems pragmatism with API and SPARQL expertise, often translating research ideas into production-ready tooling and developer workflows. Based in Wellington, UK, he enjoys mentoring, training, and quietly advancing RDF/SPARQL practice across industry mailing lists and conferences.
15 years of coding experience
12 years of employment as a software developer
BSc (Hons), Computer Science, 1st, BSc (Hons), Computer Science, 1st at University of NottinghamPhD, Computer Science, PhD, Computer Science at University of Southampton
Stackoverflow
28,336reputation
3.5mreached
537answers
49questions
rdf
top-1%
semantics
top-5%
geometry
top-5%
compact-framework
top-1%
regex
top-1%
java
top-5%
Github Skills (39)
kubernetes10
docker10
spark10
compact-framework10
scripting10
testing10
bash10
regex10
dockers10
java10
cicd10
javas10
script10
kubernetes-pods10
json-ld10
Programming languages (14)
Github contributions (5)
apache/jena
Mar 2012 - Dec 2022
Apache Jena, A free and open source Java framework for building Semantic Web and Linked Data applications.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:272 reviews, 625 commits, 77 PRs in 10 years 10 months
Contributions summary:Rob primarily contributed to the Apache Jena project by fixing bugs related to the SPARQL result set format, implementing features for the JSON-LD writer and processing graph description data, and refactoring code to use the latest versions of the Apache Commons IO library. They worked on several key features, adding support for new syntax options, improvements for performance and functionality of core data management code. The user also demonstrated knowledge in the implementation of Apache Jena's core data structures.
apache-jenaapachesparqlrdfjava
apache/spark
Jan 2015 - Apr 2021
Apache Spark - A unified analytics engine for large-scale data processing
Role in this project:DevOps Engineer
DevOps EngineerContributions:3 reviews, 18 PRs, 138 comments in 6 years 4 months
Contributions summary:Rob primarily contributed to improving the Kubernetes deployment and testing infrastructure of the Apache Spark project. Their work included enhancing the `docker-image-tool.sh` script with error handling and dependency checks, adding new backends for Kubernetes integration tests, and making image names configurable for testing. The user also addressed issues related to user IDs within the Docker images and corrected paths for custom Dockerfiles, ultimately improving the robustness and flexibility of the K8S deployment process.
analyticspythondata-processingsqlapache
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