Alan Somers
Software Architect at FreeBSD
Longmont, Colorado, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolAlan Somers is a Software Architect with 15 years of systems-level experience designing and hardening storage, file system, and OS-level software. Based in Longmont, Colorado, he architects NAS and firmware systems at Axcient after leading OS and SCSI/network stack work at Spectra Logic and Western Digital. A long-time FreeBSD committer and prolific open-source contributor, his patches span high-impact projects like libfuse, OpenZFS, tokio/mio, and rust libc/nix, often adding cross-platform compatibility and POSIX AIO support. He codes in C, C++, Rust, Python, and Ruby, and has a knack for eliminating magic numbers, closing resource leaks, and improving platform-specific correctness. Collected contributions show deep familiarity with ZFS semantics, FUSE passthrough behavior, and low-level kernel APIs—skills he applies to production appliances and distributed storage. Trained as an electrical engineer at Caltech, he blends embedded firmware roots with modern systems programming.
15 years of coding experience
19 years of employment as a software developer
California Institute of Technology
Github Skills (44)
asynchronous10
compatible10
filesystem10
ext410
unix10
system-programming10
non-blocking10
nix10
python10
scripting10
async10
freebsd10
testing10
linux10
c-programming10
Programming languages (24)
Github contributions (5)
nix-rust/nix
Jul 2016 - Jan 2023
Rust friendly bindings to *nix APIs
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:1000 reviews, 528 commits, 493 PRs in 6 years 6 months
Contributions summary:Alan primarily focused on implementing and fixing bindings for various *nix APIs within the Rust programming language, as indicated by the commit messages and code changes. Their contributions involved addressing platform-specific issues, particularly on FreeBSD and Android. They made critical adjustments to system socket functionality and handled different data types across various operating systems.
nixrustrust-bindingslibcunix
asomers/mockall
Jan 2019 - Jan 2023
A powerful mock object library for Rust
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:96 reviews, 888 commits, 487 PRs in 4 years
Contributions summary:Alan contributed to the mockall library, adding new features and fixing bugs. They improved the library's flexibility, enabling it to mock methods with more complex signatures and features, such as methods returning references and handling closure arguments. Further improvements involved enhancing the accuracy of the library, to ensure that it operates as expected.
rust
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