Zili Chen
Co-Founder at The Apache Software Foundation
Guangzhou City, Guangdong Province, China
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolZili Chen is a Co-Founder and distributed systems engineer with 12 years of experience building large-scale, fault-tolerant back-end systems and developer communities. He combines hands‑on contributions to high-profile projects like Apache Pulsar and Apache BookKeeper—fixing critical bugs, adding load‑balancing strategies and observability metrics—with product and go‑to‑market experience as a startup founder (ScopeDB) and DevRel lead. An Apache PMC member, board member, incubator mentor and open‑source evangelist, he helps projects grow both technically and organizationally across international teams. Practical and detail-oriented, he has deep expertise in storage and messaging internals yet often focuses on pragmatic fixes that improve operational stability and monitoring.
12 years of coding experience
5 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor's degree, Computer Science, Bachelor's degree, Computer Science at Peking University
Github Skills (22)
debug10
messaging10
back-end-development10
distributed-systems10
java10
apache-bookkeeper10
javas10
performance-optimization10
journaling10
apache-kafka10
pubsub10
backend10
apache-pulsar10
metric10
load-balancing9
Programming languages (8)
Github contributions (5)
apache/bookkeeper
Mar 2020 - Jan 2023
Apache BookKeeper - a scalable, fault tolerant and low latency storage service optimized for append-only workloads
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:5 releases, 838 reviews, 115 commits in 2 years 10 months
Contributions summary:Zili primarily focused on improving the Apache BookKeeper project's stability and performance by addressing and fixing critical bugs. These contributions include resolving a negative timeout issue during bookie decommissioning, fixing metrics monitoring and adding improvements to the journal page cache flush interval. The user also addressed a critical bug that affected the auto-recovery process, and modified journal related code, demonstrating a deep understanding of the system's internal mechanisms and performance characteristics.
fault-tolerantapache-bookkeeperbookkeeperfaultstorage
apache/pulsar
Nov 2019 - Aug 2022
Apache Pulsar - distributed pub-sub messaging system
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:1 release, 741 reviews, 168 commits in 2 years 9 months
Contributions summary:Zili primarily focused on fixing bugs and improving the Apache Pulsar messaging system. Their contributions include addressing a Prometheus metrics export bug, resolving an issue with standalone mode configuration, fixing a bug related to the bookie environment variables, and correcting a bug in the `setTxnidMostBits` function. They also added a new load balancing strategy and exposed several metrics for monitoring.
event-streamingpulsarmessaging-systemstreamingapache
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