Brendan Zagaeski
Software Engineer at Microsoft
Boston, Massachusetts, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolBrendan Zagaeski is a software engineer with 12 years of experience, currently contributing to Azure Cache for Redis at Microsoft out of Boston. He has deep .NET and Xamarin/Android expertise, having moved from support and program management roles into engineering while helping ship Xamarin.Android and build tooling for .NET on Android. His open-source contributions to prominent projects like mono and dotnet/android focus on build reliability, XML deserialization correctness, security hardening, and ARM64 performance improvements—practical fixes that reduce deadlocks and CI flakiness. Brendan blends low-level runtime and tooling knowledge with cloud product experience, making him effective across both developer-facing libraries and large-scale services. A detail-oriented engineer, he often tackles subtle build and concurrency issues that others overlook, improving developer experience and production stability.
12 years of coding experience
5 years of employment as a software developer
Oberlin College
Stackoverflow
2,882reputation
150kreached
27answers
1question
xamarin
top-1%
Github Skills (26)
xamarin-android10
msbuild10
net10
xamarin10
dotnet10
android-build10
asp-net10
dotnet-core10
xml-deserialization10
csharp10
android-sdk9
arm9
proguard8
runtimes8
dotnet-new7
Programming languages (9)
Github contributions (5)
dotnet/android
Mar 2018 - Apr 2021
.NET for Android provides open-source bindings of the Android SDK for use with .NET managed languages such as C#
Role in this project:
Mobile Developer (Android)
Mobile Developer (Android)Contributions:61 releases, 51 reviews, 203 commits in 3 years 1 month
Contributions summary:Brendan primarily contributed to the build process and build-related tasks for the .NET for Android project. Their commits focused on addressing build failures, improving error messages, and enhancing the overall build experience. They resolved issues related to the Android NDK, AndroidManifest, and other build tools like ProGuard and R8, ensuring that the project builds correctly for various scenarios including AAB and Debug configurations. Additionally, the user worked on improving localization and addressing deprecation warnings in the code.
dotnetandroidsdkcsharpxamarin
mono/mono
Nov 2013 - Jun 2019
Mono open source ECMA CLI, C# and .NET implementation.
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:11 commits, 8 PRs, 94 comments in 5 years 7 months
Contributions summary:Brendan primarily contributed to bug fixes and improvements within the Mono/.NET implementation, particularly focusing on XML deserialization and security-related issues. Their work involved addressing issues related to XML attribute sorting, array handling in DataContractSerializer, and incorporating missing `ConfigureAwait` calls to prevent deadlocks. They also made performance enhancements to the ARM64 exception filter.
dotnetjitruntimemonoandroid
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