Tim Perkins
Senior Staff Developer at Shopify
Arlington, Massachusetts, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolTim Perkins is a Senior Staff Developer at Shopify with 11 years of experience building resilient backend systems and developer tooling. He brings deep Ruby expertise demonstrated by contributions to high-profile open-source projects like ruby-kafka, Datadog's dd-trace-rb, Apache Avro, and RuboCop, often improving observability, schema validation, and code quality. At Shopify he focuses on large-scale code organization and maintainability, having worked on Packwerk internals to ensure correct package path semantics. His background in physics and applied mathematics from UNC Chapel Hill and graduate research at Cambridge underpins a methodical, model-driven approach to complex problems. Colleagues rely on him for pragmatic instrumentation and tracing work—he’s added Kafka tracing and span-filtering to improve production diagnostics. He pairs academic rigor with hands-on delivery, translating deep protocol and tooling knowledge into reliable shipping features.
11 years of coding experience
Graduate Research, Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics, Graduate Research, Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics at University of Cambridge (UK)B.S., Physics and Mathematics (double-major), B.S., Physics and Mathematics (double-major) at University of North Carolina - Chapel Hill
Github Skills (28)
rubocop10
static-code-analysis10
ruby-rails10
avro10
schema-validation10
tracer10
rubygems10
testing10
distributed-tracing10
kafka10
rails10
data-serialization10
kafka-node10
apm10
ruby10
Programming languages (7)
Github contributions (5)
apache/avro
Nov 2018 - Jan 2023
Apache Avro is a data serialization system.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:39 reviews, 35 commits, 50 PRs in 4 years 2 months
Contributions summary:Tim contributed significantly to the Ruby implementation of Apache Avro, focusing on logical types, schema validation, and data file handling. Their work included adding support for various logical types, such as date and timestamp, along with schema compatibility checks and default value validations. The user also addressed performance bottlenecks and made enhancements related to enum defaults and aliases within the Ruby library, improving its functionality and adherence to the Avro specification.
avrobigdatadotnetpythonrust
zendesk/ruby-kafka
Feb 2018 - Aug 2019
A Ruby client library for Apache Kafka
Role in this project:Backend Developer
Backend DeveloperContributions:7 commits, 15 PRs, 26 comments in 1 year 6 months
Contributions summary:Tim primarily contributed to the `ruby-kafka` library, adding support for new features and improving code maintainability. Their work included implementing configuration options for topic creation and introducing a frozen string literal comment to improve code quality across multiple files. They also added compatibility for a newer version of the `dogstatsd-ruby` gem, which suggests an understanding of instrumentation and monitoring practices.
apache-kafkaruby-gemkafka-consumerclient-libraryruby-client
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