Daniel Norwood
Software Engineer at Nile
Mercer Island, Washington, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolDaniel Norwood is a seasoned backend software engineer with 10+ years building reliable, production-grade systems, currently applying his experience at Nile after seven years at Confluent. He has deep expertise in Java, Apache Kafka and Kafka Connect ecosystems, contributing significant fixes and features across high-profile open-source projects such as Confluent's Schema Registry, Kafka REST Proxy, and the Kafka Connect suite. His work spans core backend functionality, connector integrations for cloud storage and databases, build stability, and test automation—often improving configurability, security integrations, and diagnostics. Daniel has a track record of maintaining complex distributed systems (including Docker images, HDFS and S3 connectors) and enhancing developer tooling and metrics libraries to improve reliability. Based in Mercer Island, WA, he pairs practical production experience with a strong foundation in computer science and math from the University of Arizona. Colleagues would note not just his steady maintenance and refactoring contributions, but an inclination toward improving observability and operational robustness in large streaming platforms.
10 years of coding experience
16 years of employment as a software developer
The University of Arizona
Github Skills (66)
cloud-computing10
testing10
databases10
hadoop10
zookeeper10
javas10
elasticsearchquery10
junit10
aws-elasticsearch10
jtest10
aws-s310
elasticsearch10
rest-api10
refactoring10
coding-style10
Programming languages (8)
Github contributions (5)
apache/kafka
May 2016 - May 2019
Apache Kafka - A distributed event streaming platform
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:16 commits, 16 PRs, 60 comments in 3 years
Contributions summary:Daniel primarily contributed to the Apache Kafka project by addressing various minor issues and adding features. Their work included adding a logfilename to error messages, extending the `fetchTopicMetadataFromZk` method, and allowing the creation of a statestore without logging enabled. They also made contributions to improve debugging by adding trace logging. Additionally, they addressed a critical bug related to closing iterators in RocksDB, and made adjustments to the Kafka AdminClient.
apache-kafkascalakafkajavastreaming
confluentinc/cp-docker-images
May 2017 - Jun 2017
[DEPRECATED] Docker images for Confluent Platform.
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:29 commits, 11 PRs, 28 pushes in 1 month
Contributions summary:Daniel primarily contributed to the core Java build and stability aspects of the `confluentinc/cp-docker-images` repository, which is related to Confluent Platform. Their work involved addressing build issues by modifying code, updating versions (e.g., 8 to 7), and improving coding style. These changes included alterations to `ClusterStatus.java`, which is a utility class that is focused on Kafka and Zookeeper readiness, demonstrating a focus on backend functionality and maintaining the reliability of the infrastructure.
confluent-platformdocker-imagesafe-settings
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