Peter Schuller

I enjoy solving problems for real users, with empathy. Distributed systems background with an emphasis on distributed storage systems (e.g. Manhattan). Served with a side of dev tools (e.g. code review at Twitter).

• saltybox (last tree before AI - in Go). I later converted it to Rust post-AI.
• farhelm - as of Sept 14 2026, this is very early. It is an experiment in making a non-trivial project sustainable over time with zero human code review. I am daily driving it to manage my agents. Talk to me about how it's going so far :) Lots of rough edges still!
• github.com/scode for more stuff.

• 2020-03 - present: Full time software engineer at Meta.
  • Worked briefly on Delos (think pluggable consensus) as my intro project.
  • Tech lead on a team operating distribution of large amounts of configuration content to millions of hosts in the fleet.
  • Tech lead on the Thrift team.
  • Tech lead on an internal equivalent of a "public cloud".
  • Have run an internal mentorship program that matches mentees with mentors for a few years.
• 2016-11 - 2020-03: Full time software engineer at Lyft (storage team).
  • Tech lead on a storage team integrating MongoDB and AWS storage into the company's infra stack.
  • Tech lead on a protobuf based "document store" backed by MongoDB or DynamoDB, with support for migration.
• 2011-11 - 2016-11: Full time software engineer at Twitter (storage team ~ 3 years, devtools for ~ 2 years).
  • Originally hired due to visible open source contributions to Cassandra. Ran and developed Cassandra. Just about became a committer to the project around the time we moved away from it.
  • Primary author and tech lead of Manhattan - written to replace Cassandra.
  • Secondary tech lead for a blob storage system.
  • ~ two year stint as tech lead in the dev prod team working on code review and source control.
• 2009-05-11 - 2011-11, employed full-time as a backend developer at Spotify (www.spotify.com) writing mostly Python, C++ and some Java.
  • Variety of things, but biggest focus was the distributed storage system that serves music to clients.
  • Began transitioning the playlist storage system onto Cassandra.
• Mid-2004 to 2009-05-10, employed full-time at Picsearch (www.picsearch.com) writing predominantly production, often mission-critical, C/C++ and Python code.
  • Production index/query system; offline indexing system; web crawler.
  • Created a database sharding framework on top of PostgreSQL.
  • Wrote a video player for the browser (in AS3/flash - actually wrote code, yes that was a thing).
• Was a co-founder of a private business (InfiDyne Technologies - www.infidyne.com) from 1999 to ~ 2009. My work in relation to InfiDyne has included system and network administration, end-user IT support, ISP services (web hosting and colocation) and software development for both internal use and for clients.
• Late 2006 to late 2008/early 2009 (on the side of the full-time position), done system administration centric consulting for a European online auction site.
• Implemented most of the backend for MobiGear (formerly www.mobigear.se - no longer maintained by the owner), a Swedish mobile content provider.
• Have spent three summers working with C/C++ and Java development in the form of summer jobs. Two of these summers were spent at the same company (MIMER - a relational database software company).

• Self-taught from an early age: at 8 years old I began programming in BASIC.
• Recent production experience with C++, Rust, Python, Go.
• Historically (some prod, mostly hobby): Clojure, Common Lisp, Ruby, Perl, some Smalltalk, Erlang, PHP.

• Historically, experience with Debian/Ubuntu based systems, systems like FAI/puppet/chef/cfengine. Some open source package maintenance (FreeBSD ports, pkgsrc). Nowadays, honestly, boxes are disposable and I'm just a tenant in them :) Once wrote a package manager on top of pkgsrc (in Common Lisp, for some reason!).

• Current experience: macOS (laptop) and Linux (Ubuntu/CentOS)
• Historical: FreeBSD, NetBSD, DragonFly BSD, Gentoo, OpenSolaris. And DOS and OS/2, if we go far enough back!
• I had a huge infatuation with ZFS, until boxes became disposable and I didn't care so much anymore.

• Operating and developed Cassandra in production (got voted in as committer, but then I moved on to other things!).
• Historically quite a bit of PostgreSQL and MySQL experience. More recently just a casual users.

• Dirt biking. Yep! I ride dirt.
• Though historical by now, I developed a very strong fascination for garbage collection algorithms/systems. Talk to me about CMS, G1, Azul's GC, read/write barriers and safe points. See lrugctest and gogctest.

• After finishing the Natural Science program at Fyrisskolan in Uppsala, Sweden, I attended the University of Maryland, College Park, USA for one year, majoring in Computer Science. Decided to re-focus on running InfiDyne full-time after the first year.

• Fluent in English and Swedish.
• Tourist level knowledge of German.
• Some knowledge of Esperanto, tlhIngan Hol. Well, "some" is a bit of a stretch by now, I have forgotten nearly everything.