Yichun Zhang
Founder & CEO at OpenResty Inc.
San Francisco, California, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolYichun Zhang is the founder and CEO of OpenResty Inc. and a seasoned systems engineer with 17 years building high-performance web platforms and tracing tools. He created OpenResty and has deep, hands-on expertise in Nginx, LuaJIT, eBPF/Stap enhancements, and performance tracing—work that powered Cloudflare’s CDN and produced widely used tools like the Flame Graph sampling toolkit. At OpenResty Inc. he leads product and engineering for XRay (dynamic tracing across stacks) and Edge (distributed traffic management), and personally developed core tech such as enhanced eBPF/Stap, optimizing compilers, and machine-coding toolchains. His open-source contributions span critical modules (redis, mysql, upstream healthchecks, Lua FFI APIs, and LuaJIT optimizations) and documentation, reflecting a commitment to both production-grade engineering and community adoption. Notably, his background includes building realtime analytics and middleware at Taobao and deep systems work at Yahoo China, showing a rare blend of web-scale product engineering and low-level runtime optimization. Based in San Francisco, he combines founder-level product leadership with continued day-to-day technical craftsmanship.
17 years of coding experience
6 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor's degree Computer Science & Technology, Bachelor's degree Computer Science & Technology at Jiangsu University
Github Skills (73)
postgresql10
nginx-conf10
testing10
plugin-development10
c1110
perl10
cffi10
c1710
lua10
foreign10
ffi10
trace10
drupal-module10
garbage-collection10
memory-management10
Programming languages (19)
Github contributions (5)
openresty/lua-resty-limit-traffic
Sep 2015 - Oct 2018
Lua library for limiting and controlling traffic in OpenResty/ngx_lua
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:40 commits, 13 PRs, 49 pushes in 3 years 2 months
Contributions summary:Yichun primarily contributed to the development and maintenance of the `lua-resty-limit-traffic` library, focusing on its core functionality. They implemented new modules, like `resty.limit.conn` and `resty.limit.traffic`, and fixed bugs within existing modules, specifically `resty.limit.req` and `resty.limit.conn`. Key changes involved adding features, correcting logical errors, and improving code stability, which contributed to the library's overall reliability and performance.
lualua-libraryngx-luangxcontrolling
FRiCKLE/ngx_postgres
May 2010 - Jul 2015
upstream module that allows nginx to communicate directly with PostgreSQL database.
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:71 commits, 1 PR, 3 pushes in 5 years 2 months
Contributions summary:Yichun primarily focused on enhancing the `ngx_postgres` module, which allows Nginx to communicate with PostgreSQL databases. Their contributions included refactoring code to use `ngx_memcpy` instead of `ngx_copy` where appropriate and addressing Valgrind memory issues, indicating a focus on code quality and memory management. They also implemented the `postgres_binary_mode` directive, expanding the module's functionality. Furthermore, they integrated recent updates of the Test::Nginx library and resolved merge conflicts.
nginxpostgresql-databasecommunicateupstreamdatabase
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