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Joel Hanson

About

Joel Hanson
Author
Joel Hanson
I work on Kafka, MCP, and event-driven systems, and write about what I learn.

About this site
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Notes on software engineering, streaming systems, and AI tooling. Mostly Kafka, MCP, and the messy parts of shipping real systems.

About me
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I’m Joel Hanson, a software engineer at IBM on Event Streams (Kafka on Kubernetes and OpenShift). Previously an AI engineer at impress.ai. Open to global and remote roles.

Day to day I work on event streaming and Kafka Connect, Kubernetes operators and platform reliability, and AI tooling around MCP and RAG. The through-line is making these systems something you can actually run in production.

Experience
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IBM, Event Streams (2021-present)
Schema registry (Apicurio V2→V3 migration lead), Connectivity Pack and MQ source/sink connectors (exactly-once, DLQ, heartbeats), Event Streams operator and platform work, Keycloak SSO, Go SCRAM CLI, plus mentoring engineers and supporting customers.

impress.ai (2018-2021)
AI and platform engineering. Built an essay ML evaluation platform that cut marking time from ~470 hours to ~2 hours. Stack was Django, Celery, Redis, and AWS, later moved to Docker/EKS.

Earlier: full-stack web and CRM work at Travidux and Mobishala.

Selected impact
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  • Led Apicurio Registry V2→V3 across multiple repos with hybrid auth, zero data loss, and no customer service interruption. This was on the critical path for Event Streams v12.1.0.
  • Connectivity Pack / MQ connectors: poison-message isolation (ErrantRecordReporter, DLQ), idle-poll heartbeats, and exactly-once under reconnect
  • Eureka Incite Gold: ACL-aware RAG over Box Notes (retrieval filtered by document permissions)
  • Open source: ContextLayer, Kafka MCP Server, and SSE→Kafka connector (adopted in Event Streams demo materials)

Skills
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  • Languages: Python, Java, Go, JavaScript, TypeScript, SQL, Bash
  • Distributed systems: Apache Kafka, Kafka Connect, Kubernetes operators, event-driven architectures, Apicurio Registry
  • Backend & data: Django, DRF, Celery, Redis, PostgreSQL, Elasticsearch, REST APIs, IBM MQ
  • Cloud & DevOps: AWS (EC2, S3, SQS, EKS), Docker, OpenShift, Jenkins, GitLab CI, Keycloak, IBM Cloud
  • Frontend: React, Angular, Next.js
  • AI tooling: MCP, RAG, FastAPI

Open source
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Credentials
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Credly profile

Resume (PDF)

Contact
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