Zak Kent
Software Engineer at Cogniac Corporation
Portland, Oregon, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolZak Kent is a software engineer with a decade of experience building reliable, performance-focused backend systems, currently based in Portland, Oregon. He spent several years at Puppet improving PuppetDB’s PostgreSQL-backed storage—optimizing queries, hardening migrations for concurrent instances, and resolving production deadlocks during garbage collection. Zak combines hands-on backend and DevOps work (CI/CD, test and build environment upgrades) with mentorship and onboarding experience, having led trainings and day-to-day code review for distributed teams. He’s comfortable navigating complex data migrations and performance bottlenecks in open-source projects, and has a history of translating operational pain points into durable engineering fixes. Less obvious: his background spans nontechnical leadership and teaching roles, which informs his strengths in documentation, training, and customer-facing support.
10 years of coding experience
12 years of employment as a software developer
Recreation and Tourism Management, Recreation and Tourism Management at Arizona State University
Stackoverflow
5reputation
136reached
0answers
1question
Github Skills (21)
puppeteer10
postgresql10
puppet10
clojure-cli10
testing10
cicd10
clojure10
automation10
sql10
automations10
package-development9
data-migration9
plugin-development9
database-design9
drupal-module9
Programming languages (10)
Github contributions (5)
puppetlabs/puppetlabs-puppetdb
Nov 2017 - Mar 2021
A puppet module for installing and managing puppetdb
Role in this project:
DevOps Engineer
DevOps EngineerContributions:1 review, 26 commits, 13 PRs in 3 years 4 months
Contributions summary:Zak's contributions primarily focused on improving the build and test environment for the `puppetlabs-puppetdb` module. This included updating the acceptance tests to support newer Puppet versions (6), integrating with beaker4, and adjusting the CI/CD setup to accommodate different Puppet repository versions (4, 5, and 6). Their work streamlined the module's build process and ensured compatibility across different Puppet environments.
puppetdbmaintenance-modepuppetinstallingpuppet-module
puppetlabs/puppetdb
Sep 2017 - Jun 2021
Centralized Puppet Storage
Role in this project:Backend Developer
Backend DeveloperContributions:108 reviews, 369 commits, 472 PRs in 3 years 8 months
Contributions summary:Zak's contributions center on refactoring and extending the PuppetDB's codebase, specifically focusing on database interactions, and data migration. The commits involve modifications to database schema, SQL query optimization, and code related to catalog and fact processing. The user also addressed potential performance bottlenecks within the codebase.
puppetdbpuppetstoragecentralizedclojure
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