Robbie Gemmell
Principal Software Engineer at IBM
Glasgow, Scotland, United Kingdom
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolRobbie Gemmell is a Principal Software Engineer with 17 years’ experience designing and hardening back-end systems, currently based in Glasgow and now at IBM after eight years in senior engineering roles at Red Hat. He specialises in messaging and AMQP protocol engineering, contributing notable fixes and enhancements to high-profile Apache projects such as ActiveMQ, Artemis and Qpid Proton that improved reliability around link handling, transactions and SASL authentication. Robbie combines deep protocol-level expertise with practical delivery, shipping tests, tooling improvements and dependency upgrades across open-source ecosystems. His background spans finance-grade development at JPMorgan to large-scale open-source collaboration, giving him a strong appreciation for correctness under production constraints. Unusually for a senior engineer, he also authors multi-language examples (Java, JavaScript, Groovy, Ruby) to help bridge library features into real-world usage. He holds a BSc (Hons) in Software Engineering from the University of Glasgow and an MEng in Mechanical Engineering with Financial Management from the University of Strathclyde.
17 years of coding experience
16 years of employment as a software developer
MEng, Mechanical Engineering with Financial Management, MEng, Mechanical Engineering with Financial Management at University of StrathclydeBSc (Hons), Software Engineering, BSc (Hons), Software Engineering at University of Glasgow
Github Skills (27)
develop10
messaging10
reactive10
amqp10
message-queue10
java10
message-system10
javas10
junit10
message-driven10
data-processing10
jtest10
message-bus10
engine10
vertx10
Programming languages (10)
Github contributions (5)
apache/qpid-proton
May 2013 - Jan 2023
Mirror of Apache Qpid Proton
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:28 reviews, 308 commits, 7 PRs in 9 years 9 months
Contributions summary:Robbie primarily contributed to the Apache Qpid Proton project by modifying Java code related to the engine and message processing. Their work included implementing and refining SASL authentication within the engine, as well as updating code related to how message format is managed. The user's contributions also involved addressing specific bugs and improving the handling of various AMQP data types.
qpid-protonrubypythonqpidamqp
apache/artemis
Jan 2023 - Mar 2023
Apache Artemis
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:1247 reviews, 9 commits, 306 PRs in 1 month
Contributions summary:Robbie primarily contributed to the ActiveMQ Artemis project by fixing and enhancing the AMQP (Advanced Message Queuing Protocol) functionality. Their work focused on preventing NullPointerExceptions when closing links, adding tests to verify those fixes, and refining the release download helper script. The commits also included improvements to handling tick deadline values for AMQP connections. Furthermore, the user integrated support for out-of-order acknowledgements and made adjustments to the handling of sent AMQP connection data, demonstrating contributions across core messaging and protocol-level features.
brokerartemisopenwireactivemqhornetq
Find and Hire Top DevelopersWe’ve analyzed the programming source code of over 60 million software developers on GitHub and scored them by 50,000 skills. Sign-up on Prog,AI to search for software developers.