Zack Dever
Software Engineer at Headway
Truckee, California, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolZack Dever is a seasoned software engineer with 14 years building high-performance search and data systems, currently working at Headway from his base in Truckee, CA. He rebuilt search infrastructure at Pandora, sped up Stripe search by 10x, and has deep hands-on experience with Kafka, Elasticsearch, Python, and Clojure. His background spans real-time streaming and data pipelines (Rdio/Kafka/Avro) to edge projects like Kinect-driven body-comparison at Kinobi, showing a rare blend of backend systems and sensor-driven realtime work. An active open-source contributor, he’s improved reliability and consumer semantics in widely used projects such as kafka-python and strengthened test infra for frontend image tooling. Outside work he balances engineering with outdoor pursuits and is especially interested in opportunities at the intersection of music, fitness, recreation, and climate.
14 years of coding experience
14 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor of Science (B.S.) Computer Science, Bachelor of Science (B.S.) Computer Science at Louisiana State University
Stackoverflow
1,642reputation
177kreached
25answers
2questions
Github Skills (18)
javascript10
python10
back-end-development10
testing10
apache-kafka10
image-processing9
messaging-system9
apidoc9
api9
dpi8
pug6
nlp6
mime-types6
nodejs6
google-chrome6
Programming languages (6)
Github contributions (5)
dpkp/kafka-python
Dec 2013 - May 2016
Python client for Apache Kafka
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:32 commits, 16 PRs, 9 pushes in 2 years 5 months
Contributions summary:Zack primarily focused on improving the `kafka-python` client's consumer functionality. Their contributions include allowing `None` timeout values, fixing a misspelling, and refactoring offset fetching logic. They also implemented schemas for various Kafka group membership and administration APIs, along with refactoring and adding metric instrumentation to enhance the library's performance and maintainability. These changes show a focus on improving the client's core features and its integration with the Kafka ecosystem.
sinkapache-kafkapythonapachepython-client
strues/retinajs
Aug 2012 - Sep 2012
JavaScript, SCSS, Sass, Less, and Stylus helpers for rendering high-resolution image variants
Role in this project:QA Engineer / Test Automation Engineer
QA Engineer / Test Automation EngineerContributions:5 commits in 9 days
Contributions summary:Zack primarily focused on improving the testing infrastructure for the `retinajs` repository. They added functionality to test fixtures and implemented tests to verify proper content type handling for retina image loading. Their work directly contributed to improving the reliability and robustness of the library, as shown by tests now passing again. They also introduced options to control default configurations, which are also being tested.
stylussasscssjavascriptresolution
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