Brian De Alwis
Staff Software Developer at Google
Guelph, Ontario, Canada
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolBrian De Alwis is a Staff Software Developer with 19 years of experience balancing hands-on engineering, product thinking, and customer-facing problem discovery. Based in Guelph, Ontario, he has founded and led small organizations and now drives cloud-native build and deployment tooling at Google after a decade of entrepreneurial and research roles. His open-source contributions to prominent projects like GoogleCloudPlatform/buildpacks, Skaffold, and Jib show deep expertise in container build systems, DevOps automation, and improving developer experience. Comfortable refactoring core build pipelines and fixing subtle cross-platform bugs, he brings both systems-level rigor from a PhD in computer science and practical instincts honed running startups. Known for "packing stuff in containers and then figuring out how it all went wrong," he excels at turning messy operational problems into reliable, testable solutions.
19 years of coding experience
25 years of employment as a software developer
Ph.D. Computer Science, Ph.D. Computer Science at The University of British ColumbiaB.Math. Computer Science, B.Math. Computer Science at University of Waterloo
Stackoverflow
2,924reputation
230kreached
148answers
1question
kubernetes
top-5%
Github Skills (29)
kubernetes10
docker10
containerization10
dockers10
java10
gcp10
javas10
go10
build-automation10
kubernetes-pods10
golang10
buildpack10
testing9
gradle9
automation9
Programming languages (16)
Github contributions (5)
GoogleContainerTools/skaffold
Sep 2018 - Nov 2022
Easy and Repeatable Kubernetes Development
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer & DevOps Engineer
Back-end Developer & DevOps EngineerContributions:2 releases, 730 reviews, 413 commits in 4 years 1 month
Contributions summary:Brian made several contributions focused on improving the build process for the project. Their work included refactoring to use better abstractions, adding test skeletons, and improving support for Jib builds, indicating involvement in backend build-related tooling. Additionally, the user addressed a bug and updated the dependencies, showing a focus on maintaining and improving the project's core infrastructure.
containershelmrepeatabledockerdeveloper-tools
GoogleContainerTools/jib
Jul 2018 - Mar 2020
🏗 Build container images for your Java applications.
Role in this project:Back-end Developer & DevOps Engineer
Back-end Developer & DevOps EngineerContributions:74 commits, 146 PRs, 289 pushes in 1 year 8 months
Contributions summary:Brian primarily focused on improving the Jib build process and internal tooling. They fixed Javadoc warnings and case-insensitive authentication for bearer tokens. Key contributions include improvements to the base image pulling and logging, and adding the ability to specify an entrypoint. Further work included modifying the build.sh script and adding support for the docker.io registry.
containersdocker-registrymaven-plugingradlemaven
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