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Clutta

Real-time observability for silent failures. Built on the premise that detection is a verification problem, not a collection problem.

Go · Kafka · OpenTelemetry · WebSocket · early access

Kafka Storage Load Balancer

A rebalancer for production Kafka, built solo: 17,000+ partition leaders and 50,000+ replicas redistributed in batches of 200, gated by broker disk thresholds. Rebalancing stopped being a maintenance window and became a command.

Python · Kafka internals · Salt · in production · field notes ↗

Subscription Activator

Designed and implemented end to end: a Go daemon for a service-continuity platform that continuously discovers suspended subscriptions and restores the ones that qualify. Remediation as a daemon rather than a runbook.

Go · Redis · GraphQL · Nomad · in production

Kafka metadata: from hand-rolled to DataHub

First a topic-ownership service, designed and implemented end to end, aggregating ACLs, log dirs and consumer groups. Then, having hit the limits of hand-rolled metadata, DataHub: ElasticSearch reliability and schema-registry integration, contributed upstream to LinkedIn's open source.

Python · Java · ElasticSearch · Confluent Schema Registry

CSDR: a data layer for Rich Communication Services

RCS is now widely supported across Android and, since 2024, iPhone: a decade after this work, it has become a mainstream mobile messaging standard, with end-to-end encryption arriving in the Universal Profile. A decade before that, I built the subscriber-data layer such networks need: MySQL, MongoDB and Redis exposed as one OData repository inside a live IMS core. Infrastructure for a standard the world had not adopted yet.

Java EE · OData · MySQL · MongoDB · Redis · Open IMS Core · 11,575 LOC · read the thesis ↗

FRER, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology

First P4 implementation of IEEE 802.1CB frame replication, built clause by clause on a nine-switch bmv2 smart grid testbed, with the ONOS P4Runtime driver written to support it. Worked the hardware path on Netronome SmartNICs before running the full testbed on software switches: same proof, none of the cost.

P4 · ONOS · bmv2 · Mininet · SDN · NFV · live testbed

Elevation, Precision & Product Vision

From deep systems mastery to shaping resilient infrastructure, building teams, and crafting tools for others to scale.

• Independent practice. Backend and infrastructure transformations across distributed systems, container orchestration, and event-driven platforms.
• Solely designed and delivered Kafka platform tooling at production scale: automated rebalancing of 50,000+ replicas, topic-ownership metadata with upstream DataHub contributions, per-role log pipelines into ElasticSearch.
• Service-continuity engineering. Designed and implemented end to end a Go daemon that discovers and restores suspended subscriptions automatically, in production.
• Clutta. Observability as a product rather than a practice. In early access.

Systems Under Fire

Diagnosing, dissecting, and restoring at enterprise scale. The years that proved dashboards can be green while the system lies.

• Source-level debugging across Java, .NET and Linux systems, including reverse engineering binaries to trace undocumented production behaviour.
• Backend APIs and Kafka-powered notification systems for a new internal platform, integrating incompatible software products under load.

From Code to Systems Thinking

Research conducted the way production is run: live testbeds, working code, and specifications implemented rather than cited.

• MSc with Distinction, Rhodes University. Rich Communication Services, working directly from 3GPP and GSMA specifications. Designed and implemented the CSDR end to end: 11,575 lines of sole-authored Java exposing MySQL, MongoDB and Redis as one OData repository, a 3GPP user data convergence realization inside a live IMS core testbed. Telkom Centre of Excellence award, Best Computer Science Research Student. Two SATNAC papers.
• Research, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology. SDN and NFV for smart grids: networks where a packet arriving late can damage physical equipment, so failure must be engineered out rather than noticed after. Prototyped on P4 bmv2 software switches, with Netronome SmartNICs evaluated for the hardware path.
• Presented twice at Schloss Dagstuhl, the Leibniz Center for Informatics: computer science's renowned, invitation-only, approval-based meeting center for working seminars. The topic both times: software-defined networks that let critical infrastructure survive its failures. The discussions formed the basis of Clutta's thinking.
• Mentored engineers through protocol engineering: from reading a standard to a running implementation.
• Telecom infrastructure research. Reverse-engineered the Fraunhofer FOKUS FHoSS into a stateless HSS prototype speaking Diameter, with SIP telephony and messaging servers built against it, and containerised the OpenIMSCore stack.

Foundation Years

Delivering working systems without external scaffolding. No frameworks, no teams, often no prior blueprint. Every line of code had to matter.

• B.Tech Computer Science, First Class Honours. Chancellor's Prize for best graduating student in external national academic competitions.
• First production systems, built for real users. An SMS-authenticated e-voting system, a results alert system, an IPv4 subnetting tool for Cisco NetAcad students, and ID-card generation software, in Java and PHP.
• First research, first machine learning. Latent semantic analysis and probabilistic LSA to cluster stakeholder requirements; the work became a refereed Inderscience journal article.
• Oracle certified. OCP Java Programmer, OCE SQL Expert, OCA Database 11g.