Sidney August Cammeresi IV

IN OPERIBUS PERFECTIONEM

Work

I currently write software at Readyset, a database caching system written in Rust.

I was previously a Principal Engineer for MariaDB Xpand, the best distributed relational database in the world, which no one knew about. I worked on it for 12 years, first at Clustrix and then at MariaDB, up until its cancellation. I spent a lot of time on improving performance at scale by any means necessary, be that by increasing the degree of multinode, multicore parallelization or by improving the efficiency of internal data balancing processes. I also did many projects related to storage such as skiplist tables, columnar indices, and undo processing. I often focused on product quality by creating tools that helped other developers, by making it harder to introduce bugs, by monitoring source code changes, and by mentoring new developers. The product was immensely interesting, having being written in continuation passing C code that used an asynchronous runtime before such became widely popular.

Education

2015 — Postgraduate Diploma in Business Administration from the Edinburgh Business School at Heriot-Watt University
2003 — Master of Computer Science from the University of Illinois
2000 — BS in Computer Science from the University of Illinois

Hobbies

kettlebells — snatching a 24-kg (53-lb) iron ball with a handle from the floor to overhead without dying
ham radio — local and long distance communication, many operating awards
redundant power — with a wending into PCB design
speaking Italian — since 2007, decent fluency, also a dual citizen
learning Korean — since 2017, a big challenge—도전—including learning some Chinese—中國語—to improve vocabulary
fountain pens — writing it down to remember it now
wearing capes — Italian and Spanish
studying Objectivism — practicing loyalty to rational principles

Trivia

From August 2009 until March 2011, my wife and I lived in Rome, Italy. It was quite an adventure. We raise our two children bilingually, and I speak to them only in Italian. Even though English is my native language, in their entire lives, I have never spoken to them in English.

In 2020, at the beginning of those unprecedented times, I became a rye baker. I have several types of rye bread and other rye-based foods in my repertoire. I grind almost all flour myself from rye and several other grains.

I used to go around taking photographs with an 11x14-inch view camera. The most common question I got while using it in public was whether one could still get film for it.

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