About

I am Dr. Richard Zowalla, a Research Software Engineer and Member of the Apache Software Foundation. I build software, and I help other people build it well.

I currently work at Fraunhofer IAO, in the Research and Innovation Center for Cognitive Service Systems (KODIS). I am also co-founder and CTO of Colorful Bytes GmbH, through which I offer the consulting, training and workshops listed on the Services page.

My work sits at the intersection of applied research and real software engineering: designing scalable systems for web-scale crawling, information retrieval and stream processing, and making sure the engineering around them is solid enough to run in production, not just demo well.

I am a member of the Apache Software Foundation, where I serve as committer, PMC member and PMC chair across several projects (including Apache Storm and StormCrawler). Open source is where I learned to write code, mentored by people patient enough to explain why something was wrong and generous enough to let me try again. Much of what I do now is passing that forward: reviewing first patches, welcoming new committers and helping engineers grow from contributors into peers. See the Open Source page for details.

Alongside the systems work, I care a lot about software engineering as a craft: testing, code review, maintainability, the things that separate research code that happens to run from software people can depend on. Increasingly that is where I focus, raising the engineering bar in applied research settings through hands-on work and workshops. I hold a doctorate and spent a decade teaching and building software at Heilbronn University before moving into applied research.

Speaking & conferences

I regularly speak at conferences and events. A few impressions: