Joseph Lawson
Category: Uncategorized
Joining OpenSource Connections
Hello world! My name is Joseph (Joe) Lawson and I’m the newest team member to OpenSource Connections (OSC). If you’re unfamiliar, people don’t join OSC just for another job and it’s no different for me. My passion lies in making people’s computing experience as pain-free as possible, sharing information and making that information more accessible. OSC is the go-to company for information retrieval via search. By drawing upon my experience in making efficient data systems and combining it with OSC’s expertise in search I will be able to make a greater impact on people’s lives than if I was working behind the scenes at one company.
Experience
I have practiced system and software engineering for over ten years. My projects have ranged from small specialized government web applications catering to individual needs on up to large sites with million dollar stakeholders that take on tens of millions of visitors each month. While delivering reliable systems for my colleagues and clients I’ve also engaged in “getting it done”. This practice ranged from chasing down obscure show stopper bugs (and fixing them) to enabling multiple production deploys a day with a robust software development lifecycle centered around continuous integration. My goal is to make your project better. I’m not shy about asking questions to figure out the right direction or choice of directions for each client.
OSC is search.
That’s right and I love search! I believe that everyone can benefit from finding the right data faster and want to help everyone experience the joy of a properly tuned machine and pipeline. OSC lets me learn the breadth of the greatest search engines out there and help others run their search systems reliably.
I’ve designed and run multi-staged Elasticsearch clusters on Amazon Web Services which ingested at peak tens of thousands records per second and accumulated over a billion records each month. While designing this dynamically scaling logfile ingestion platform, I wrote the third party Logstash plugin logstash-kafka which was eventually included in Logstash 1.5.0.
Anything else?
I have contributed in multiple languages to a multitude of open source software projects such as gor, Moto, Jenkins’s Amazon EC2 Plugin, Logstash and many more. Some highlights of recent contributions include:
- PR 116 allows gor’s HTTP worker queue to scale up and down dynamically eliminating replay throughput bottlenecks.
- PR 235 implements in Moto some of the more advanced features of CloudFormation template processing such as the Fn::GetAtt command which can get attributes of any other resource created in the template.
- PR 224 implemented Amazon Web Services’ tagging API into Moto. All of it.
I know scalable applications and how to contribute to software projects in impactful ways and am looking forward to unleashing this knowledge for you at OpenSource Connections! Please feel free to get in touch to discuss how I can help you.