Ash Mckenzie
Principal Engineer at Buildkite
Australia
Summary
🤩
RockstarAsh Mckenzie is a Staff Security Engineer at GitLab with 12 years of engineering experience and a deep background in backend, operations, and systems roles across startups and large companies. A Ruby and Go enthusiast, he moved from co-founding a startup to senior engineering roles at Zendesk before joining GitLab, where he contributed notable refactors to the widely used gitlab-shell repository—improving API layering, HTTP handling, and testability. He blends hands-on backend development and DevOps expertise with security stewardship, helping teams evolve infrastructure without sacrificing maintainability. Based in Australia, Ash combines practical Unix-era systems knowledge with modern cloud-native practices, and is known for quietly improving developer experience through reusable API abstractions and sensible refactors.
12 years of coding experience
27 years of employment as a software developer
English
Github Skills (14)
nethttp10
http10
api-rest10
rspec10
rest-api10
api-design10
restful-api10
ruby10
apidoc9
api9
automations8
automation8
testing8
cicd7
Programming languages (20)
Github contributions (5)
gitlabhq/gitlab-shell
Jul 2018 - Jul 2018
Replacement for gitolite. This repo is a mirror of https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-shell/
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer & DevOps Engineer
Back-end Developer & DevOps EngineerContributions:8 commits in 9 days
Contributions summary:Ash primarily focused on refactoring and improving the backend infrastructure of the GitLab shell. Their contributions included moving HTTP logic into a dedicated helper class, supporting HTTP headers and JSON in API requests, and refactoring the codebase for RSpec upgrades and deprecation fixes. They also enhanced the codebase by introducing a base API endpoint for reusability and refactoring host to internal API endpoint.
gitlabgitoliteshell
ashmckenzie/salt
Apr 2015 - Jun 2017
Contributions:88 pushes, 2 branches in 2 years 2 months
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