Robert Donkin
Founding Director at Identity E2E
Bradford, England, United Kingdom
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolRobert Donkin is a founding director and seasoned software engineer with 24 years’ experience building high-throughput, near-real-time distributed systems, event-driven microservices and secure cloud platforms primarily on Kubernetes and AWS. He blends hands-on polyglot engineering (Kotlin, Scala, JavaScript/TypeScript, Python, Java) with leadership across startups and enterprises, from launching William Hill’s US sportsbook to long-running retail analytics and ML projects. An early Apache contributor and elected ASF member, he has made notable maintenance and quality-focused contributions to widely used libraries like Apache Commons (lang, collections, pool). Robert combines academic rigor in mathematics and advanced computer science with a practical, team-first approach—he still counts the people and teams he’s worked with as the career highlights.
24 years of coding experience
18 years of employment as a software developer
Postgraduate Diploma Advanced Computer Science, Postgraduate Diploma Advanced Computer Science at The University of ManchesterMSc Interdisciplinary Mathematics, MSc Interdisciplinary Mathematics at University of WarwickMaths Physics Chemistry Russian Biology CDT English Geography Music, Maths Physics Chemistry Russian Biology CDT English Geography Music at Titus Salt School
English, Russian
Github Skills (18)
apache-commons10
reflection10
commons10
multithreading10
testing10
pool10
object-pooling10
java10
javas10
object-pool10
synchronization10
collections10
reflections10
concurrency10
software-design9
Programming languages (2)
Github contributions (5)
apache/commons-pool
Oct 2003 - Mar 2006
Apache Commons Pool
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:37 commits in 2 years 5 months
Contributions summary:Robert's contributions primarily involve fixing synchronization issues and adding validation checks within the Apache Commons Pool library. They addressed missed synchronization in various pool implementations, including StackObjectPool, GenericObjectPool, SoftReferenceObjectPool, GenericKeyedObjectPool, and StackKeyedObjectPool. The user also corrected an error in the eviction behavior and refactored the code to use TimerTask instead of Thread for more efficient evictions. Additionally, they removed a dependency on commons-collections and updated javadoc contracts.
apache-commonscommons
apache/commons-collections
May 2003 - Nov 2005
Apache Commons Collections
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:6 commits in 2 years 7 months
Contributions summary:Robert contributed to the Apache Commons Collections project by implementing new features and fixing bugs. They introduced functionality to the ReferenceMap class, including the ability to purge values, and added associated tests. The user also rolled back a commit due to an accidental broad commit, demonstrating a focus on code quality and precise changes. Finally, they added themself to the committers list.
apache-commonscommons
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