Dave Smith
Co-Founder CTO at 3rd Eye Robotics
Denver Metropolitan Area United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolDave Smith is a seasoned engineering executive and co-founder/CTO with 26 years in software and 17 years in leadership, known for turning ideas into pragmatic, scalable systems across cloud infrastructure, low-latency datastores, and real-time messaging. He has repeatedly grown early engineering teams into high-performing organizations—scaling DigitalOcean’s engineering from 20 to 130 and expanding Packet through acquisition into Equinix Metal—while maintaining hands-on expertise in distributed systems and protocol design. A deep Erlang and backend systems contributor, his open-source work includes core pieces of Riak, Bitcask and related tooling, demonstrating strong low-level data-structure and concurrency skills. Comfortable across hardware, network and software stacks, he’s led teams shipping bare-metal clouds, storage systems and authentication platforms. Based in Denver, he combines pragmatic execution with a quiet taste for digging into tricky performance and reliability bugs that others shy away from.
18 years of coding experience
26 years of employment as a software developer
B.S, Computer Information Systems, B.S, Computer Information Systems at University of West Florida
Github Skills (49)
property-based-testing10
debugging10
minecraft-forge10
key-value-store10
erlang10
webmachine10
back-end-development10
apidoc10
testing10
command-line-arguments10
http10
distributed-systems10
leveldb10
c1110
java10
Programming languages (18)
Github contributions (5)
basho/bitcask
Mar 2010 - Sep 2012
because you need another a key/value storage engine
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:163 commits in 2 years 6 months
Contributions summary:Dave implemented core functionality for a key/value storage engine, focusing on the "bitcask" project. Their contributions centered around adding and refining the keydir, including its implementation using hash tables, and creating functions such as put, get, remove, and copy for data management. They also added the ability to create, sync, and read files, alongside the necessary functionality for processing them. The user's work demonstrates a strong understanding of data structures, file I/O, and the Erlang NIF environment.
storage-engine
basho/basho_bench
Dec 2009 - Aug 2012
A load-generation and testing tool for basically whatever you can write a returning Erlang function for.
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:128 commits in 2 years 9 months
Contributions summary:Dave primarily contributed to the development of the `basho_bench` project, a load-generation and testing tool. Their work involved the creation of core components such as the worker and stats system, as well as the implementation of a driver for interacting with a raw HTTP backend. They also added support for various key generation methods, enabling the generation of test data. Furthermore, the user made several integration and refactoring changes to the codebase.
erlangtesting
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