Brian Downs
First Deputy Commissioner, Chief Of Staff at Oklahoma Insurance Department
Phoenix, Arizona, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolBrian Downs is a seasoned public-sector strategist and administrator with 11 years of leadership experience, currently serving as First Deputy Commissioner and Chief of Staff at the Oklahoma Insurance Department. He blends policy development, organizational leadership, and project management with hands-on technical contributions to open-source projects in Go and Kubernetes ecosystems. His GitHub work includes improving developer experience for the Buffalo web framework and building a polished Go terminal spinner library, while also contributing security and deployment hardening to RKE2 and K3s. A former small business owner and longtime legislative chief of staff, he pairs entrepreneurial pragmatism with government-facing policy know-how. Based in Phoenix, he is a lifelong learner who brings a rare mix of policy, operations, and DevOps fluency to complex, regulated environments. Notably, he contributes to high-profile cloud-native projects, reflecting an interest in secure, production-grade infrastructure beyond his day job.
11 years of coding experience
3 years of employment as a software developer
B.A. Corporate Communications, Business/Corporate Communications, B.A. Corporate Communications, Business/Corporate Communications at University of Central Oklahoma
Github Skills (38)
kubernetes10
docker10
security-hardening10
scripting10
testing10
webpages10
etcd10
spinner10
dockers10
web-content10
cicd10
script10
go10
kubernetes-pods10
golang10
Programming languages (17)
Github contributions (5)
briandowns/spinner
Dec 2014 - Apr 2022
Go (golang) package with 90 configurable terminal spinner/progress indicators.
Role in this project:
Full-stack Developer
Full-stack DeveloperContributions:29 releases, 5 reviews, 241 commits in 7 years 5 months
Contributions summary:Brian's primary contribution was the development and refinement of a Go-based terminal spinner/progress indicator library. Their commits focused on adding new features, such as different character sets and the ability to reverse the spinner's direction, as well as incorporating new functionality like the `Finally` message. They also improved existing tests and added new testing functionality in line with new features. Furthermore, the user made adjustments to the underlying structure, including function renames and code format updates.
terminal-spinnerprogress-bargoindicatorsprogressbar
rancher/rke2
May 2020 - Jan 2023
Role in this project:DevOps Engineer
DevOps EngineerContributions:322 releases, 1340 reviews, 420 commits in 2 years 8 months
Contributions summary:Brian's commits primarily focus on enhancing the RKE2 project's compliance with CIS 1.5 standards and other security improvements. Their work includes removing basic authentication from the API server, adding audit arguments, and setting secrets-encryption flags by default, demonstrating a strong focus on security hardening. Further contributions involve modifying the deployment process, including updates to the installation script, to manage and orchestrate the deployment of RKE2 components, including the implementation of network policies.
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