# Chris Vest

> Staff Software Engineer at Apple

Location: Santa Clara, California, United States
Profile: https://flows.cv/chrisvest

A perpetual learner and professional developer. I combine deep technical knowledge with deft use of abstraction and patterns to make systems that are reliable, maintainable and as simple as can be. And I inspire others to do the same.

Too much crappy code is being written, and I want to do something about that.

I have built a BI and reporting system with self-healing properties, and optimised it to effectively handle hundreds of millions of data-points. I have written the authorisation back-end to a custom single sign-on system, and a number of open source software projects, including Fabric (pythonic remote automation) and Stormpot (fast and thread-safe object pooling for Java).

I enjoy social life both on and off the job, and like going to conferences, meet-ups, events, etc.
I also occasionally give talks, and I am co-organizing the Copenhagen JVM Interest Group.

Specialties: Back-End/Server Programming · Concurrency & Multi-Threading · High Performance & Low Latency · Mechanical Sympathy · Self-Healing Systems · MySQL · TDD · Test Automation & Unit Testing · Clean Code · Maintainable Software Design · Hard Problems · Simplicity & Complexity · Java & JVM Languages · Neo4j, Database Internals & Graph Databases

## Work Experience
### Staff Software Engineer @ Apple
Jan 2020 – Present
- Developing and maintaining the Netty project. Netty is an open source programming library written in Java, that allows Java programs to create an interact with computer network connections, and various data transmission protocols on such networks, such as TCP, UDP, HTTP, STOMP, DNS, etc. This also includes features for establishing secure connections, like TLS and HTTPS.
- Analyse and fix bugs in Netty, both reported internally at Apple, as well as from the open source community that uses Netty.
- Developed a modern buffer API optimised for the network I/O and event-loop architecture used in Netty.

### Senior System Engineer @ Neo4j
Jan 2013 – Jan 2020 | Malmö
Working on the Neo4j graph database.
- Database/transaction processing engine.
- Lock manager and dead-lock detection.
- Native memory, page cache (file buffer), and IO subsystem.
- Adversarial file system for testing with fault injection.
- Logical volume management, block storage and DBFS (a file system).
- Page cache profiling and warmup.
- Performance tracer system.
- Checkpointing.
- Fulltext schema indexes.
- Indexing infrastructure (index updates, locking, transaction state, schema mutation).
- Managing a database internals study group.
- Collaborating with hardware partners to optimise performance.
- Researching MVCC designs.
- Researching data locality and compression techniques.

### System Engineer @ Systematic
Jan 2011 – Jan 2013
- Worked as an implementation consultant, my duties included traveling to customer sites to help them implement systems to requirements specifications, on either time-and-material contracts, or on fixed-cost contracts.
- Developing and maintaining a data entry system, and document management system, for the Danish Police, implemented in Java.
- Developing and maintaining a data entry system for the Danish Business Authority, implemented in Java.

### Programmer @ Unwire
Jan 2007 – Jan 2011 | Copenhagen, Capital Region, Denmark
- I design and implement systems using Java, SQL and web technologies.
- I inspire my colleagues to do higher quality work.
- I am a key specialist on concurrency, SQL and web service technologies.
- I am a specialist on TDD and code quality.
- Worked on various projects in the organisation, implementing systems in Java.
- Implemented a single-sign-on system to unify log-ins across all customer facing systems.
- Implemented a master-data-management system for cross-cutting data, such as currency exchange rates and tax rates.
- Implemented and maintained a data-warehouse, ETL, and reporting system, to collect and present billing, traffic and usage information across all customer facing systems.
- Maintain a WAP (Wireless Application Protocol) gateway that allowed feature-phones at the time to access device-optimised websites.
- Maintain an SMS gateway at the core of Unwires business, used by customers to implement a variety of SMS-based services.


## Education
### Datamatiker
Lyngby Uddannelsescenter


## Contact & Social
- LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/christianvesthansen
- Portfolio: http://chrisvest.name

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Source: https://flows.cv/chrisvest
JSON Resume: https://flows.cv/chrisvest/resume.json
Last updated: 2026-04-12