Tanner Nelson
Lead Software Engineer at SpaceX
Brownsville, Texas, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolTanner Nelson is a lead software engineer with 11 years of experience building high-performance server-side systems and tooling, currently driving engineering at SpaceX. He created the Vapor web framework and has deep expertise in Swift server ecosystems, contributing to Swift NIO, Fluent ORM, and APNSwift for HTTP/2 push notifications. His work spans low-level networking, authentication, and database integrations, demonstrating a knack for both protocol-level detail and pragmatic developer APIs. Tanner’s open-source contributions power benchmarked Swift web frameworks and improve core libraries used by the community. Based in Brownsville, Texas, he blends founder-level product instincts from leading Vapor with production-scale experience at SpaceX. An under-the-radar strength is his history of converging modern Swift concurrency and security (OpenSSL/JWT) into robust, production-ready libraries.
11 years of coding experience
14 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor of Arts (BA) Computer Science, Bachelor of Arts (BA) Computer Science at New York University
English, Chinese
Stackoverflow
4,045reputation
75kreached
61answers
12questions
swift
top-5%
Github Skills (35)
asynchronous10
application-framework10
apn10
benchmark10
performance-monitor10
non-blocking10
async10
app-framework10
http10
authentication10
user-authentication10
benchmarking10
databases10
vapor10
io10
Programming languages (19)
Github contributions (5)
vapor/vapor
Jan 2016 - Jan 2021
💧 A server-side Swift HTTP web framework.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:297 releases, 8 reviews, 2832 commits in 5 years 1 month
Contributions summary:Tanner's commits primarily involve modifying core files within the Authentication and Core directories. The changes focused on improving security and adding more robust support for the authentication protocol. They demonstrate proficiency in server-side development, including password handling and authentication mechanisms.
http2frameworkswift-nioswiftserver-side
vapor/fluent
Jan 2016 - Feb 2021
Vapor ORM (queries, models, and relations) for NoSQL and SQL databases
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:136 releases, 874 commits, 368 PRs in 5 years 1 month
Contributions summary:Tanner contributed to the development of the Vapor ORM, focusing on core database-related functionalities. Their commits primarily involved implementing model interactions, including creating model classes, defining their properties, and building their relationship to the data stored in the database. The user added new classes and protocols to support database operations such as saving and retrieving data while enhancing the underlying mechanisms for querying and data persistence.
relationsnosqlmysqlsqldatabases
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