During December 2024, Clay focused on stabilizing the shuffle spill path in the apache/incubator-gluten repository, addressing reliability and memory management for large-scale sort-based workloads. He resolved an OutOfMemory issue that occurred when compression was disabled, refining the BufferOutputStream creation logic in C++ to respect buffer size and reduce excessive memory allocation. By optimizing the IO path and memory usage, Clay improved the stability and resource utilization of shuffle operations under no-compression configurations. His work demonstrated depth in distributed systems and performance optimization, resulting in lower failure rates and more predictable memory behavior in production-like environments without introducing new features.