Yung-chin Oei
Senior Software Engineer at Piclo
Cambridge, England, United Kingdom
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolYung-chin Oei is a Senior Software Engineer based in Cambridge with 14 years of experience building reliable backend systems and developer tooling. He combines deep academic training (PhD in Biophysics from Cambridge) with entrepreneurial experience as a serial co‑founder, bringing scientific rigor to product and engineering decisions. At Piclo he progressed from Software Engineer to Senior SWE, and previously contributed significant backend work to high‑performance open-source projects like pykafka and the bup backup utility, implementing librdkafka-backed consumers and improving test automation and reliability. Comfortable with C extensions, Python, and systems-level concerns, he excels at performance tuning, multi‑partition streaming, and productionising open-source components. Colleagues praise his ability to translate complex protocols into robust, well-tested implementations—a skill honed across startups and sponsored open-source engagements.
14 years of coding experience
11 years of employment as a software developer
Doctoraal Physics, Doctoraal Physics at Leiden UniversityDoctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.) Biophysics, Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.) Biophysics at University of Cambridge
Stackoverflow
1,549reputation
158kreached
14answers
5questions
sqlite
top-5%
Github Skills (28)
git10
python10
scripting10
testing10
bash10
librdkafka10
backup10
script10
sys10
sh10
apache-kafka10
shell10
multithreading9
sqlite9
performance-optimization9
Programming languages (6)
Github contributions (5)
Parsely/pykafka
Jan 2015 - May 2016
Apache Kafka client for Python; high-level & low-level consumer/producer, with great performance.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:351 commits, 57 PRs, 189 pushes in 1 year 3 months
Contributions summary:Yung-chin contributed significantly to the pykafka project, focusing on the implementation of a librdkafka-backed consumer. They implemented the Consumer and Producer classes using a C extension wrapper for librdkafka, enabling multi-partition consuming, and ensured proper exception handling. Their work included the integration of delivery reporting to enable better performance. They also addressed issues related to stopping and finalising the consumers, and enabled SSL connections.
apache-kafkapythonkafkac-extension
apenwarr/bup
Dec 2011 - Oct 2012
Please switch to using the github.com/bup/bup repo instead!
Role in this project:Back-end Developer / Test Automation Engineer
Back-end Developer / Test Automation EngineerContributions:8 commits in 10 months
Contributions summary:Yung-chin primarily contributed to bug fixes and improvements to the `bup` backup utility. They addressed issues related to server mode activation, tree decoding performance, and test failures when running tests from trees with dot-names. Their work also involved enhancing the test suite by adding new tests and modifying existing ones to improve the reliability and coverage of the backup process. The user's contributions included changes to Python code and shell scripts (t/test.sh).
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