Brian James
Senior Software Development Engineer at GitHub
Old Toronto, Ontario, Canada
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolBrian James is a Senior Software Development Engineer with 22 years of experience, now at GitHub and based in Old Toronto. He blends systems-level programming and secure backend engineering, with notable open-source contributions to cornerstone projects like Git, Git for Windows, Git LFS and the Rust package manager Cargo that improved reproducibility, security, and protocol handling. Comfortable across languages and stacks, he has delivered low-level C and Go improvements (CSPRNG, SHA-256, struct refactors) alongside test automation and DocBook tooling work in Asciidoctor. Known for pragmatic refactors that reduce identifier leakage and improve compatibility, he brings a long history of making developer tools more robust and privacy-conscious.
22 years of coding experience
2 years of employment as a software developer
The University of Sydney
Stackoverflow
71,627reputation
6.8mreached
2,115answers
0questions
radix
top-5%
git
top-1%
ubuntu
top-5%
github-api
top-1%
visual-studio-code
top-5%
ssh-keys
top-1%
Github Skills (73)
cargo10
github10
package-management10
testing10
ssh-keys10
rsa10
ruby10
security10
docbook10
buildsrc10
ssh10
system-programming10
githubactions10
object-oriented-programming10
git-lfs10
Programming languages (25)
Github contributions (5)
git-lfs/lfs-test-server
May 2019 - Sep 2022
Standalone Git LFS server
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:6 reviews, 20 commits, 14 PRs in 3 years 4 months
Contributions summary:Brian primarily focused on improving the server-side implementation of the Git LFS server. Their contributions include code tidying via `goimports`, which improved code formatting and readability. They corrected an issue related to the Accept header in verify requests, ensuring compliance with the specification. Furthermore, they enhanced the server's functionality by enabling it to accept 64-bit integers in the Range headers, and they refactored the code to utilize the Go 1.16 embed functionality.
lfsversion-controlrustlfs-serverstandalone
git-lfs/git-lfs
Aug 2018 - Jan 2023
Git extension for versioning large files
Role in this project:Back-end Developer & DevOps Engineer
Back-end Developer & DevOps EngineerContributions:6 releases, 398 reviews, 1155 commits in 4 years 5 months
Contributions summary:Brian contributed to the Git LFS project by implementing features related to shell command integration and improving the handling of SSH-related configurations. They made substantial changes in the areas of network transfer and SSH protocol, adding support for SOCKS proxies and various Git settings. Additionally, they implemented more robust handling of edge cases and made improvements to the test suite.
git-extensionversion-controllibgit2git-addonsversioning
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