Tao Xiao is an engineering manager with 11 years of experience building and leading Java/JEE teams across Australia and China, currently driving engineering at SmartNews. He combines deep hands-on expertise in integration and enterprise middleware (EAI, EIPs, JBoss, WebLogic) with a proven track record of refactoring and delivering mission-critical web applications. Previously a senior engineer at eBay and developer at AXA and base2Services, he is comfortable across the full Java stack (Spring, Hibernate, JPA) and modern build/test tooling (Maven, Ant, TDD, Agile). Tao also contributes to core open-source infrastructure—improving Apache Kafka’s MirrorMaker reliability and producer thread-safety—reflecting a focus on robustness and performance in distributed systems. Known for turning complex integration challenges into maintainable solutions, he brings both technical depth and pragmatic leadership to large-scale engineering efforts.
11 years of coding experience
13 years of employment as a software developer
Master, Information technology, Master, Information technology at RMIT University
Contributions:7 commits, 6 PRs, 15 comments in 1 year 5 months
Contributions summary:Tao primarily contributed to the Apache Kafka project by fixing bugs and improving MirrorMaker functionality. Their work includes addressing issues related to offset commits in MirrorMaker during low traffic scenarios and preserving message timestamps. They also made code improvements to ensure thread safety and avoid unnecessary value copying in the producer clients. These changes suggest a focus on improving the reliability and efficiency of Kafka's core components.
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