Tom Chappell
Principal Software Engineer at Fastly
Palm Springs, California, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolTom Chappell is a Principal Software Engineer with over three decades of hands-on systems and product engineering experience and a decade focused on modern cloud-native and edge platforms. Currently at Fastly, he was one of the three engineers to prove out and implement the Next-Generation Web Application Firewall on Compute@Edge, owning much of its Decision Engine and later delivering Premier-tier features like IP and non-IP rate limiting. He brings deep systems-language fluency (Go, TinyGo, Java, C/C++, Scala) and a track record building high-performance security and ingestion pipelines using Elasticsearch, Kafka-style tooling, Spark, and distributed primitives like Akka and Redis. His career spans foundational work on backup and diagnostic products in the 80s–90s through large-scale enterprise network management and modern edge security, showing rare continuity from low-level C/C++ systems to serverless edge compute. Based in Palm Springs, he combines pragmatic performance optimization with product-minded engineering, having repeatedly re-architected decision engines to enable richer rulesets and lower-cost deployments. Notably, he blends research-era experience with current cloud-native practices, making him adept at translating legacy constraints into efficient, secure edge services.
10 years of coding experience
39 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor of Science Computer Science, Bachelor of Science Computer Science at California State University, NorthridgeInformation and Computer Science, Information and Computer Science at Georgia Institute of Technology
Stackoverflow
1reputation
0reached
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Github Skills (28)
gravity9
finite-state-automata8
dfa8
lex8
automata8
lexical-analysis8
lexer7
nfa7
compiler-construction7
kebab-case7
fsm6
naming-conventions6
regex6
scala6
java6
Programming languages (3)
Github contributions (5)
tomchappell/libfsm
Apr 2021 - Apr 2021
DFA regular expression library & friends
Contributions:1 push, 1 branch in 1 day
dfaregular-expressionregular
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