About Me

Hi, I’m Tom and I am a Staff Software Engineer at Reddit.

My CV in a paragraph: I have a degree in Rocket Science (yes really), a Masters degree in Audio Acoustics, 7 years experience as an Acoustic Consultant, a Masters degree in Computer Science and I was accepted onto the inaugural year of Newcastle University’s Centre for Doctoral Training (CDT) in Cloud Computing for Big Data. Thanks to that I have a PGDip in Cloud Computing for Big Data and a PhD in distributed systems. In 2018 I spent several months working at Twitter to apply my research to their stream processing platform. After that I worked for Red Hat on their event streaming platform based on Apache Kafka and Strimzi. I also helped design and build Red Hat’s managed Kafka offering. Now I work at Reddit, helping to run thier internal messaging (Apache Kafka) and stream processing (Apache Flink) infrastructure.

My PhD research was focused on modelling distributed stream processing systems. These systems, such as Apache Storm and Twitter Heron, can perform operations of vast amounts of data arriving in real time such as the billions of Tweets and associated events that are issued every day. The aim was to improve the way in which these systems add/remove resources and reconfigure themselves to meet changing demand (auto-scale). More details can be found on the PhD page.

As well as my research I run the local Python user group (Python North East), work on a few other projects and I still like to mess around writing fiction from time to time.