Davide Cavalca
Production Engineer, Linux Userspace at Asahi Linux
San Francisco, California, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolDavide Cavalca is a Production Engineer specializing in Linux userspace with 17 years of systems, SRE and embedded Linux experience, currently based in San Francisco and working at Meta. He blends kernel- and userspace-level expertise—holding multiple production roles at Meta and long-term hands-on work on embedded distributions like GeeXboX and OpenBricks—with deep DevOps craftsmanship around systemd, packaging and fleet automation. An active open-source contributor and community leader, he has extended high-profile projects such as the widely used MAME emulator (adding SGI MIPS and HP-UX software lists), enhanced Chef/Ohai for nuanced systemd and platform telemetry, and serves in governance roles across Asahi Linux, CentOS and Fedora ecosystems. Colleagues rely on him for solving low-level integration problems that span emulation, kernel quirks, packaging and large-scale operational tooling.
17 years of coding experience
14 years of employment as a software developer
MSc Computer Engineering, MSc Computer Engineering at Università di PaviaDiploma, Diploma at Liceo Scientifico
Italian, English
Github Skills (31)
c-language10
oai10
configuration-management10
linux10
ruby10
chef-client10
hp-ux10
automation10
infrastructure10
sys10
infrastructure-as-code10
systemd10
chef-solo10
automations10
emulation10
Programming languages (24)
Github contributions (5)
facebook/chef-cookbooks
Apr 2016 - Jan 2023
Open source chef cookbooks.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer & DevOps Engineer
Back-end Developer & DevOps EngineerContributions:53 reviews, 268 commits, 51 PRs in 6 years 10 months
Contributions summary:Davide primarily contributed to the development of the `fb_apt` cookbook, which is used to configure Debian/Ubuntu systems to work with the Facebook environment. Their contributions included adding and removing keys for APT repositories, modifying the source list, and general refactoring, specifically to address comments on previous pull requests. Furthermore, they demonstrated DevOps skills by working on the build and deployment of the infrastructure configurations within the Chef repository.
chef-resourcemanaged-by-terraformchefcookbooks
facebook/IT-CPE
Sep 2019 - Jan 2023
Meta's Client Platform Engineering tools. Some of the tools we have written to help manage our fleet of client systems.
Role in this project:DevOps Engineer
DevOps EngineerContributions:23 commits in 3 years 4 months
Contributions summary:Davide primarily contributes to the automation and management of infrastructure within the Chef ecosystem. They are focused on developing and maintaining custom resources and helper methods for managing system reboots, handling file serialization, and ensuring proper configurations. The user demonstrates expertise in defining platform-specific behaviors and extending Chef capabilities with custom functionalities.
metaengineeringfleetplatform-engineeringtools-engineering
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