Brendan Forster
Staff Software Engineer
Canada, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar
Top expert inModern Software Development and DevOps Practices
Brendan Forster is a Staff Software Engineer with 14 years of experience building and automating developer tools, releases, and cross-platform desktop experiences. Based in Canada and active at GitHub, he blends deep backend skills in .NET and native modules with full-stack contributions to projects like GitHub Desktop and Electron. Brendan has a strong track record improving build and release pipelines—authoring FAKE, Cake, and PowerShell automation—and strengthening test coverage across libraries such as Reactive Extensions, libgit2sharp, and git-lfs. His open-source work shows a pragmatic focus on maintainability: refactoring, dependency cleanup, and stabilizing edge cases (Unicode password handling, certificate trust, and rebase UX). Colleagues know him as a “recovering open source cat herder” who quietly pays off technical debt while improving developer ergonomics.
14 years of coding experience
Stackoverflow
2,628reputation
145kreached
64answers
1question
github
top-5%
github-api
top-5%
Github Skills (80)
nuget10
libgit210
wp-api10
testing10
winapi10
fakerjs10
refactor10
libgit2sharp10
asp-net10
build-automation10
wpf10
refactoring10
ws-api10
dotnet-new10
dotnet10
Programming languages (28)
Github contributions (5)
atom/node-keytar
Jul 2017 - May 2021
Native Password Node Module
Role in this project:
Backend Developer
Backend DeveloperContributions:1 release, 17 reviews, 123 commits in 3 years 10 months
Contributions summary:Brendan focused on enhancing the `node-keytar` module, which provides native password storage capabilities. Their contributions include adding tests to validate Unicode support within the password handling logic, demonstrating a focus on internationalization. Furthermore, the user addressed deprecated function calls in the native code and refactored string handling, suggesting an understanding of the underlying system and API changes. They also improved the build process by adding support for GitHub Actions.
node-modulekeychainlibsecretcredential-storage
desktop/dugite
Aug 2016 - Jul 2019
Elegant bindings for working with Git in your Node applications
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:30 releases, 693 commits, 213 PRs in 2 years 11 months
Contributions summary:Brendan contributed to the development of elegant bindings for working with Git in Node applications. They focused on implementing the core functionality, including the `GitProcess` class and its methods for executing Git commands and handling errors. The user also added a script for downloading Git binaries and integrating them into the project, showcasing their ability to address build and dependency management. Further contributions focused on packaging and the creation of test harnesses, which helped improve the project's maintainability.
node-applicationnodejsdugite-native
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