Chris Lamb
Board Member at Open Source Initiative (OSI)
Cambridge, England, United Kingdom
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolChris Lamb is a veteran open source software engineer and board-level leader with 26 years' experience, an official Debian Developer since 2008 and Debian Project Leader from 2017–2019. He combines hands-on systems and backend engineering (Python/Django, Redis, Debian packaging) with governance roles as a director of the Open Source Initiative and Software in the Public Interest. As a prolific maintainer and author, he drives reproducible builds work, maintains Lintian and core packages like Redis and Memcached, and has authored dozens of FOSS projects while contributing to hundreds more (including Tails). His background includes scaling consumer platforms (Playfire, Thread.com) and embedded/IoT contributions upstream (e.g. shairport-sync) and practical improvements to tooling such as Puppet’s file handling. Based in Cambridge, he mixes deep technical craftsmanship with policy and infrastructure stewardship, and has been recognized by grants and a Google Open Source Peer Bonus for security and reproducibility work. Notably, he also architects and maintains public web services like Ethermap, showing a blend of infra, product, and community-facing engineering.
26 years of coding experience
7 years of employment as a software developer
Computer Science, Computer Science, Computer Science, Computer Science at University of Warwick
English
Stackoverflow
302reputation
6kreached
7answers
0questions
Github Skills (26)
symlink10
debug10
puppeteer10
file-management10
puppet10
rspec10
airplay10
c1110
ruby10
c1710
sys10
audio-streaming10
audio-player10
embedded10
git9
Programming languages (16)
Github contributions (5)
mikebrady/shairport-sync
Dec 2015 - Jan 2021
AirPlay and AirPlay 2 audio player
Role in this project:
Embedded Systems Engineer / IoT Developer
Embedded Systems Engineer / IoT DeveloperContributions:8 commits, 9 PRs, 15 comments in 5 years 1 month
Contributions summary:Chris primarily contributed to fixing bugs and improving the code quality of the shairport-sync project. Their work involved correcting typos, addressing security vulnerabilities in the bundled tinysvcmdns library, and making various minor adjustments throughout the codebase. The user demonstrated a focus on maintaining code standards and addressing specific issues reported in bug reports, enhancing the stability and security of the AirPlay audio player.
audio-playerairplaysynchronized-audioaudioembedded-systems
puppetlabs/puppet
Mar 2013 - Jun 2016
Server automation framework and application
Role in this project:Backend Developer
Backend DeveloperContributions:9 commits, 1 PR in 3 years 3 months
Contributions summary:Chris primarily focused on improving the Puppet framework's file management capabilities. Their contributions involved modifying code related to file serving, metadata handling, and testing around symbolic links. They addressed bugs related to how Puppet handles file permissions and symbolic links, ensuring correct behavior when using the `links => follow` option. The user also updated test cases to reflect the corrected behavior after bug fixes.
frameworkautomationjavaautomation-frameworkserver-automation
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