Alan Griffiths
Software Engineer at Octopull Ltd
United Kingdom
Summary
🤩
RockstarAlan Griffiths is a seasoned software engineer with 14+ years of professional experience, currently focused on maintaining and evolving Canonical's Mir display server and promoting test-driven development. He brings deep C++ expertise, pragmatic design sensibilities, and a strong interest in development processes, tooling, and mentoring, honed through both long-term roles and his own consultancy, Octopull Ltd. Alan is an active backend contributor to notable open-source projects at Canonical—Mir, Multipass and snapd—where he has fixed race conditions, improved performance, and implemented session/login interfaces with associated security controls. His background includes extensive contract work in the financial sector and leadership roles in the ACCU community, reflecting a blend of enterprise-grade delivery and community-driven craftsmanship. Colleagues value his steady focus on code quality, refactoring, and practical application of patterns to real-world system-level problems.
14 years of coding experience
20 years of employment as a software developer
Stackoverflow
1reputation
0reached
0answers
0questions
Github Skills (27)
interface-builder10
c-language10
apparmor10
linux10
bash10
user-interface10
interface-design10
go10
cprogramming-language10
wayland10
testing9
admin9
command-line-interface9
administrator9
dbus9
Programming languages (14)
Github contributions (5)
canonical/mir
Mar 2018 - Jan 2023
The Mir compositor
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:31 releases, 1784 reviews, 565 commits in 4 years 10 months
Contributions summary:Alan primarily focused on back-end development within the Mir compositor project, addressing issues and improving the software's functionality. Their contributions involved fixing problems in the server's functionality, addressing race conditions, and refactoring existing code. The user also made changes to the build process and utilized their skills to improve performance.
musiccompositormir
canonical/snapd
Apr 2019 - May 2021
The snapd and snap tools enable systems to work with .snap files.
Role in this project:Backend Developer
Backend DeveloperContributions:16 reviews, 15 commits, 10 PRs in 2 years 1 month
Contributions summary:Alan's contributions primarily involve the development of the "session" interface and the "login-session-control" interface within the `snapd` project. They implemented the initial structure of the session interface, adding associated tests. Subsequent commits focused on adding and refining AppArmor rules and access permissions for system services. They also refactored code, including renaming an interface.
snapdsnap
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