Brandon Nelson
Staff Software Engineer at Google
New York, New York, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolBrandon Nelson is a Senior Software Engineer based in New York with a decade of experience building backend systems and DevOps tooling, currently contributing at Google. He brings practical expertise in distributed systems and deployment workflows, having worked on Spinnaker's Halyard for configuration and rollout automation and contributed to Google's Martian HTTP/S proxy to improve CONNECT tunnel and MITM handling. His background spans high-impact roles from game engine lead programmer to enterprise backend consultant, giving him a rare mix of systems-level C++/graphics experience and cloud-native web engineering. A former Marine Corps corporal, he combines disciplined problem-solving with pragmatic engineering—often focusing on robustness, observability, and deployment reliability in production.
10 years of coding experience
15 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor of Science (B.S.) Computer Science, Bachelor of Science (B.S.) Computer Science at University of North Texas
Github Skills (20)
middleware10
back-end-development10
testing10
http10
proxy10
java10
javas10
go10
spinnaker10
deployment-automation10
hal10
tls129
debian9
tls139
mtls9
Programming languages (6)
Github contributions (5)
spinnaker/halyard
Nov 2017 - Apr 2019
A tool for configuring, installing, and updating Spinnaker
Role in this project:
Back-end & DevOps Engineer
Back-end & DevOps EngineerContributions:23 commits, 40 PRs, 13 pushes in 1 year 5 months
Contributions summary:Brandon primarily contributed to the back-end of the Spinnaker configuration tool, halyard. Their work included implementing features for local Git deployments and handling runtime configurations. They also addressed bugs related to systemd configuration and deployment processes, suggesting a focus on DevOps aspects. Furthermore, the user worked on the grpc deployment endpoint and other minor bug fixes.
installingupdatingspinnaker
google/martian
Apr 2016 - Jul 2016
Martian is a library for building custom HTTP/S proxies
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:17 commits, 7 PRs, 2 pushes in 3 months
Contributions summary:Brandon primarily focused on enhancing the functionality of the Martian proxy library, specifically concerning its handling of CONNECT tunnels and MITM configurations. Their contributions include enabling the proxy to handle HTTP messages within CONNECT tunnels and implementing the ability to inspect the connection to determine data type. The user also added logging to provide more insight into the proxy's behavior, particularly around response handling, and improved the robustness of the code by addressing issues with connection closures. The changes include modifications to proxy.go and proxy_test.go, indicating a focus on core proxy logic and testing of the behavior.
proxiesproxygolangtestingmiddleware
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