Alex Kiernan
Director at ZUMA ARRAY LIMITED
Huntingdonshire, England, United Kingdom
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolAlex Kiernan is a seasoned technology leader and director with 21 years of experience delivering cost-effective, scalable IoT platforms that span hardware, embedded software and cloud services. He has held senior engineering and CTO roles at Hive/Centrica and startups, and now leads A Squared Projects and Zuma Array, combining hands-on platform engineering with strategic leadership. Known for driving reproducible build and deployment practices, Alex contributes to prominent open-source projects like OpenEmbedded and OSTree, improving build reproducibility and test resilience across diverse environments. He blends deep systems and DevOps expertise with a track record of large-scale migrations and platform consolidations that delivered multimillion-pound savings. Based in Huntingdonshire, he brings pragmatic technical stewardship informed by an electronics engineering background and a habit of fixing thorny build problems early in the toolchain.
21 years of coding experience
26 years of employment as a software developer
Keswick SchoolBachelor of Engineering (BEng) Electronics, Bachelor of Engineering (BEng) Electronics at University of Southampton
English
Stackoverflow
1reputation
0reached
0answers
0questions
Github Skills (34)
scripting10
testing10
software-update10
build-system10
yocto10
build210
script10
ostree10
in-app-updates10
package10
build-automation10
sh10
updater10
buildsrc10
shell10
Programming languages (8)
Github contributions (5)
openembedded/openembedded-core
Jun 2018 - Jan 2023
The official Git repository is at https://git.openembedded.org/openembedded-core/.
Role in this project:
Back-end & DevOps Engineer
Back-end & DevOps EngineerContributions:158 commits in 4 years 7 months
Contributions summary:Alex made several contributions focused on the build and deployment process of the openembedded-core repository. They modified build scripts and configuration files to enhance reproducibility, particularly by incorporating git timestamps for image generation and standardizing paths for file retrieval. Additionally, the user addressed dependency issues by adding required packages and fixing build-related problems for tools and libraries within the project. This included improvements for reproducible builds for the kernel and image build processes.
git-repositoryopenembedded
openembedded/meta-openembedded
Jun 2020 - Jan 2023
Role in this project:DevOps Engineer
DevOps EngineerContributions:37 commits in 2 years 7 months
Contributions summary:Alex Kiernan's contributions primarily focused on maintaining and updating recipes and build configurations for the OpenEmbedded/Yocto project. Their work included upgrading various software packages (audit, mosh, libcoap, ulogd2, jansson, nftables, ntpsec, libgpiod, ostree, usbguard, dnsmasq, uriparser, lldpd, mdns, keyutils, conntrack-tools, faad2, onig) within the OpenEmbedded build system. These updates involved adapting recipes for newer versions, addressing build issues, and integrating new features, indicating a strong emphasis on build system management and ensuring software package availability. They also contributed to the integration of systemd services and improvements in ptest configurations.
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