Chris Dent
Windows Infrastructure Engineer at The D. E. Shaw Group
London, England, United Kingdom
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolChris Dent is a seasoned Windows infrastructure engineer and automation specialist with over 18 years of cross-discipline experience and 11 years focused on infrastructure roles, currently driving Windows platform reliability at D. E. Shaw in London. He combines deep PowerShell expertise, infrastructure-as-code practices (Puppet, DSC) and CI/CD automation to accelerate cloud-based Windows orchestration and deployment. A pragmatic problem-solver, Chris has improved test quality in prominent PowerShell projects such as Pester and contributed extensive test coverage to the popular PSKoans learning repo, showing a strong commitment to tooling and developer experience. His background spans finance, media and government, giving him a rare blend of security-conscious operations and large-scale systems engineering. Colleagues rely on his analytical approach and rapid adoption of new technologies to deliver robust, auditable automation solutions.
10 years of coding experience
11 years of employment as a software developer
PG Dip: Advanced Networking, Network and System Administration/Administrator, PG Dip: Advanced Networking, Network and System Administration/Administrator at The Open University
Stackoverflow
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powershell
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Github Skills (16)
test-automation10
assertion10
powershell10
pester10
testing10
bdd9
tdd9
datetime9
windows6
active-directory6
csv6
export-to-csv6
dsc6
regex6
cmd6
Programming languages (5)
Github contributions (5)
vexx32/PSKoans
Oct 2018 - Jan 2020
A simple, fun, and interactive way to learn the PowerShell language through Pester unit testing.
Role in this project:
QA Engineer / Test Automation Engineer
QA Engineer / Test Automation EngineerContributions:4 reviews, 21 commits, 25 PRs in 1 year 3 months
Contributions summary:Chris primarily contributed to the quality and maintainability of the `pskoans` repository. They added and updated a significant number of tests, including validation tests for koans and tests for update and reset commands. Furthermore, they modified existing test files to improve test coverage, fix bugs, and align test positions. The user’s work focused on ensuring the integrity and functionality of the PowerShell koans and related commands through thorough testing.
powershelltestingpesterunitpowershell-module
pester/Pester
Feb 2016 - Jun 2021
Pester is the ubiquitous test and mock framework for PowerShell.
Role in this project:QA Engineer / Test Automation Engineer
QA Engineer / Test Automation EngineerContributions:6 commits, 4 PRs, 18 comments in 5 years 5 months
Contributions summary:Chris primarily contributed to the testing framework by adding and modifying test cases, specifically related to the `PesterThrow` assertion. They implemented tests for error ID matching, message matching, and negative assertions, and also addressed trailing whitespace and updated argument completer functionalities. The contributions focus on enhancing the reliability and functionality of Pester's assertion capabilities, with an emphasis on edge cases and error handling.
assertionspowershelltestingbddtdd-framework
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