Dominik Charousset

Dominik Charousset, M.S.

CAF Evangelist | C++ Expert | Speaker | Consultant | Freelancer

As creator, chief evangelist and lead developer of CAF—the C++ Actor Framework—, I promote CAF at conferences such as C++ Now, parallel, SPLASH, and CoNEXT as well as at local C++ User Groups.

As consultant, I help companies to create hightly scalable applications with CAF by advising, training and supporting software development teams around the world.

As freelancer, I help my clients to build robust software at any scale with more than a decade of experience in designing, engineering, testing, benchmarking, and deploying systems software in C++.

Open Source Projects

CAF is an open source C++ actor model implementation featuring lightweight & fast actor implementations, pattern matching for messages, network transparent messaging, and more.

Zeek is a powerful network analysis framework that is much different from the typical IDS you may know. Among other contributions, I have implemented the streaming-based communication infrastructure for Broker, Zeek's messaging library that is based on CAF.

VAST is a platform for network forensics at scale that is based on CAF. With over 700 commits in more than 100 pull requests, I contributed many essential features such as streaming-based ingestion and implemented many performance improvements.

Selected Talks

Broker: Zeek's Msg Library.
Zeek Webinar.
Online, May 2021.

Streaming in CAF.
C++ User Group.
Hamburg, October 2018.

Actor Programming for HPC.
Deutsches Klimarechenzentrum.
Hamburg, August 2016.

Type-safe Messaging in C++.
C++Now Conference.
Aspen, May 2014.

Selected Consulting Engagements

2019: 1-day workshop at Lumicks BV, Amsterdam, the Netherlands.

Introductory CAF Tech Talk for novice to advanced CAF developers.
Advising on debugging and performance monitoring of CAF-based software systems.
Advising best practices for complex processing pipelines and stream processing with CAF.

2017: 4-day workshop at ATS SpA, Milan, Italy.

In-depth CAF Tech Talk for advanced to expert CAF developers.
On-site training with excercises for selected aspects of the framework.
Review for the software architecture of already existing CAF-based software at ATS.
Advising on best practice for copy-on-write and low-latency messaging with CAF.

2014: 3-day workshop at SAP SE, Walldorf, Germany.

Introductory CAF Tech Talk for a broad audience at SAP.
Interactive CAF kickoff session with in-depth discussion of programming concepts, strengths, and use cases.
On-site training with excercises for various aspects of the framework.

Recent Freelancing Experience

2019—2021: GLVI, Hamburg, Germany.
A distributed C++ application for assisting air traffic controllers.

Designing the distributed, message-based architecture.
Implementing critical system components such as fork/join-based work load distribution and error handling.
Implementation of deterministic replay tools, test infrastructure and unit tests as well as benchmarking and performance tuning.
Documenting delivered software components and giving in-house work shops for knowledge transfer.

2019—2021: Corelight Inc (part time), San Francisco, USA.
Publish/subscribe-based communication infrastructure for Zeek.

Designing and implementing a new application-layer multicast (ALM) protocol for the publish/subscribe communication to enable data exchange with 3rd-party tools and to make Zeek clusters robust to node failures.
Designing and implementing various benchmarks that exercises Broker communication under heavy load to ensure correct operation and assess performance.
Analyzing system behavior and performance metrics of Broker and designing and implementing performance improvements based on the evaluation results.

Skills

Programming Languages
C++, Python, Java, Scala, Erlang, Haskell.

Software Tools
CMake, Git, Jenkins.

Tookits
Qt, Swing.

Misc. Software
MS Office, iWork, Vim, Bash.

Operating Systems
Linux (mostly headless), macOS (primary), Windows.

Education

2008—2012 Master of Science
Computer Science.
Hamburg University of Applied Sciences.

2005—2008 Bachelor of Science
Computer Science.
Hamburg University of Applied Sciences.

Languages

German
Native speaker.

English
Fluent in speech and writing.

Work Experience

since 02/2014
Consultant & Freelancer, Self-Employed
An ever expanding and growing CAF community allows me to offer consulting and training in addition to working as a freelancer. My rich experience in designing, engineering, testing, benchmarking, and deploying systems software (primarily in C++) also enables me to help my clients building robust and scalable software at any scale.

05/2012—12/2019
Researcher, Hamburg University of Applied Sciences
Full-time employee until 12/2017. Research focus: scaling distributed systems by combining the actor model of computation with a resource-efficient, native runtime environment in C++. As member of the INET research group, I published research papers, gave technical lectures, mentored students, wrote research proposals and helped organize research projects. Further, I also maintained software tooling infrastructure such as the self-hosted Jenkins installation.

01/2018—07/2019
Co-Founder and CEO, Tenzir GmbH
Development of a highly scalable software for cyber security (network forensics). Founding and leading a cyber security startup also exposed me to all things business. From hiring software engineers and organizing our agile development process with clubhouse.io to negotiating with investors and generating leads on trade shows.

Publisher	Dominik Charousset
VAT ID	DE314897337
Address	Dompfaffenweg 55 22147 Hamburg Germany