Portrait of Quang N. Vu

Hi, I'm

Quang N. Vu

Senior Software Engineer at Confluent

Toronto, Canada

Building scalable distributed low-latency applications and pipelines, and leveraging data for actionable insights.

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01

About & skills

Having experience in software development and a research degree in software engineering, I am into mining software repositories for insights that help developers improve productivity and succeed in their goals.

Engineering areas I am passionate about:

  • Leveraging data for actionable insights for decision-making processes.
  • Building scalable distributed low-latency applications and pipelines that can handle a large amount of data in real-time.

Languages

  • Go
  • Java
  • Kotlin
  • Python
  • R
  • JavaScript
  • SQL
  • HTML/CSS
  • Shell scripting

Cloud & infrastructure

  • AWS
  • Kubernetes
  • Kubernetes controllers/CRDs
  • Terraform
  • Docker
  • OpenShift

Data stores

  • Redis
  • PostgreSQL
  • MySQL

DevOps & CI/CD

  • Jenkins
  • Maven
  • TeamCity
  • Semaphore CI
  • UrbanCode Deploy
  • SonarQube
  • Artifactory
  • Kibana

Machine learning & data

  • Pandas
  • NumPy
  • Scikit-learn
  • Keras
  • TensorFlow
  • NLTK

Data mining techniques: web crawling, feature engineering, machine learning, statistical analysis, natural language processing.

02

Work experience

  1. Senior Software Engineer

    Confluent

    • November 2023 – Present
    • Toronto, Ontario, Canada
    • Built cluster deletion protection for Confluent Cloud.
    • Developed Terraform infrastructure to provision a secondary Confluent control plane in AWS for disaster recovery. Authored runbooks that streamlined the build process for teammates and enabled regular disaster-recovery testing drills.
    • Built a synthetic testing pipeline, deployed as a Kubernetes CronJob across 100+ cloud regions, to monitor the health of the team's key services: the API server and operator. The tests cover real-world customer scenarios and serve as quality gates for the release train.
    • Migrated a partner team's static Kubernetes resources to Custom Resource Definitions (CRDs), decoupling their release cycle from ours and enabling faster, independent development iteration across both teams.
    • Designed and built several k8s-like controllers for cloud resource reconciliation.
    • Go
    • Terraform
    • Kubernetes
    • AWS

  2. Senior Software Engineer

    eBay

    • July 2021 – November 2023
    • Toronto, Ontario, Canada
    • Designed and implemented API request batching to a downstream content service, reducing end-to-end latency by ~30% and enabling content ranking in a single request for an improved user experience.
    • Built a localization feature for the eBay native app, enabling navigation bar text to dynamically reflect the user’s device language settings; resolved a localization gap affecting millions of users.
    • Developed APIs for microservice integrations, using contract-first development with OpenAPI to establish clear service contracts and facilitate independent development across teams.
    • Built and optimized large-scale distributed services handling millions of client requests across web and native platforms, with a focus on performance, scalability, and reliability. Monitored and validated production tracking events using Kibana.
    • Set up A/B experiments to evaluate new features and UI designs, providing data-driven insights to inform product launch decisions.
    • Mentored junior engineers on software development practices, system design, and engineering best practices.
    • Java
    • Kotlin
    • REST APIs
    • Maven
    • Spring Framework
    • Jenkins
    • OpenAPI
    • SQL
    • Kibana
    • Python

  3. Software Developer

    Fiix by Rockwell Automation

    • November 2020 – July 2021
    • Toronto, Ontario, Canada
    • Developed scalable reactive RESTful microservices using Spring WebFlux, Reactor Core, and Axon Framework, supporting asynchronous and concurrent request processing.
    • Implemented authentication and authorization with Spring Security to secure service APIs and enforce access controls.
    • Designed and implemented an API rate limiter using Redis, integrating it with API gateways to enforce request and concurrency limits across services; designed database schemas to support configurable rate-limit policies.
    • Java
    • PostgreSQL
    • MySQL
    • AWS CodeBuild
    • AWS CodePipeline
    • IntelliJ IDEA
    • JUnit 4

  4. Graduate Research Assistant

    University of Alberta

    • September 2019 – September 2020
    • Edmonton, Alberta, Canada
    • Published two papers on mining distribution platforms, at the International Conference on the Foundations of Digital Games (FDG 2020 paper, FDG 2021 paper). The FDG 2021 paper won the Best Paper Award (Game Analytics and Visualization track).
    • Built several web crawlers in Python for mining digital software repositories (using Scrapy).
    • Performed data analysis using several techniques: data cleaning, feature selection, machine learning modelling, and visualization using R, Python, SQL, pandas, and NumPy.
    • Developed Natural Language Processing scripts for topic modelling (using Latent Dirichlet Allocation) and a content-based recommendation system (using Rapid Automatic Keyword Extraction (RAKE) algorithm).
    • Built a website to demonstrate a recommendation system and collect feedback from users.
    • JavaScript
    • R
    • Python
    • SQL
    • pandas
    • NumPy
    • D3.js

  5. Software Developer

    Citi

    • July 2016 – July 2019
    • Singapore
    • Designed and developed distributed Java microservices using Spring to calculate valuations and dividends across multiple classes of derivatives, following Test-Driven Development (TDD) practices.
    • Containerized microservices with Docker and deployed them on OpenShift, enabling consistent and scalable service deployment.
    • Automated the end-to-end CI/CD pipeline spanning testing, static code analysis, integration, deployment, and artifact management using TeamCity, UrbanCode Deploy, SonarQube, and Artifactory; eliminated ~80% of manual tasks and enabled single-click deployments.
    • Automated periodic operational tasks such as data transfers and database cleanup using Shell scripts and AutoSys, reducing manual effort by ~90%.
    • Revamped a monolithic web application into several web-fragment microservices, thereby enabling the plugability of components for easy deployment or removal.
    • Java
    • Spring Framework
    • Docker
    • OpenShift
    • TeamCity
    • SonarQube
    • Gradle
    • MySQL

03

Education

Master of Science (Research), Software Engineering

University of Alberta

September 2019 – September 2020 Alberta, Canada

  • GPA: 4.0/4.0
  • Relevant course (grade): Data Analytics in Software Engineering (A+), Software Construction & Verification (A), Digital Image and Video Processing (A).
  • Authored 2 research papers on mining digital distribution platforms; one won the Best Paper Award (Game Analytics and Visualization track), FDG 2021.

Bachelor of Engineering (Honors) in Computer Engineering

National University of Singapore (NUS)

Singapore

  • Awards:
    • ASEAN Undergraduate Scholarship (2012 – 2016): awarded to outstanding students from ASEAN countries.
    • Dean's List (Semester 1, AY 2012/2013) in recognition of academic excellence and being in the top 5% of the cohort.
    • NUS Awards for Study Abroad (NASA) Exchange Scholarship.
    • Adlerbert Foreign Student Hospitality Foundation Scholarship (Jan – Jun 2015): awarded by Chalmers University of Technology for exchange study.

Student Exchange Program, Computer Science

Chalmers University of Technology

January 2015 – May 2015 Gothenburg, Sweden

04

Selected projects

Indie Games Recommendation

Best Paper Award (Game Analytics and Visualization track), FDG 2021.

Indie games often lack visibility as compared to top-selling games due to their limited marketing budget and the fact that there are a large number of indie games. Players of top-selling games usually like certain types of games or certain game elements such as theme, gameplay, storyline. Therefore, indie games could leverage on their shared game elements with top-selling games to get discovered.

Published as: Quang N. Vu, Cor-Paul Bezemer, “Improving the Discoverability of Indie Games by Leveraging their Similarity to Top-Selling Games: Identifying Important Requirements of a Recommender System,” in International Conference on the Foundations of Digital Games (FDG), 2021

  • Python
  • Scrapy
  • Pandas
  • D3.js
  • MySQL
  • AWS RDS
  • AWS EC2
Preprint paper recommendindie.games

An Empirical Study of the Characteristics of Popular Game Jams and Their High-ranking Submissions on itch.io

Game jams are hackathon-like events that allow participants to develop a playable game prototype within a time limit. Having a high-ranking game is a great bonus to a beginning game developer's résumé and their pursuit of a career in the game industry. However, participants often face time constraints set by jam hosts while balancing what aspects of their games should be emphasized to have the highest chance of winning. In this project, an empirical analysis of 1,290 past game jams and their 3,752 submissions on itch.io was conducted to understand better what makes popular jams and high-ranking games perceived well by the audience.

Published as: Quang N. Vu, Cor-Paul Bezemer, “An Empirical Study of the Characteristics of Popular Game Jams and Their High-ranking Submissions on itch.io,” in International Conference on the Foundations of Digital Games (FDG), 2020

  • Python
  • Scrapy
  • Pandas
  • MySQL
Preprint paper

What are hackathon participants talking about?

A topic modeling approach using Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) and several natural language processing techniques to identify the challenges, lessons learned, and future goals described by the participants of hackathons.

  • Python
  • Scrapy
  • Pandas
  • MySQL
  • gensim for LDA
Code repo

05

Open source on GitHub

My public repositories are listed on my GitHub profile.

namespaceclasscontroller

A Kubernetes controller that adds a set of objects to every namespace of a "class", defined by a NamespaceClass custom resource.

Go
 uk-universities-course-crawlers

Scrapy web crawlers that collect course data from eight UK universities, including UCL, Edinburgh and Bristol.

Python
 startup-idea-generator

A Streamlit app that generates startup ideas for a given industry, using the Cohere API.

Python
 LogService

A Spring microservice that reads a log file and returns the last N lines that contain a search text.

Java

All repositories on GitHub