Colin Percival
Release Engineering Lead at Tarsnap
Burnaby, British Columbia, Canada
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolColin Percival is a release engineering leader with 23 years of experience in systems, security, and cryptography, currently serving as Release Engineering Lead for The FreeBSD Project. A long-standing FreeBSD committer and former security officer, he blends deep theoretical training (D.Phil. in Computer Science, Oxford) with pragmatic open-source engineering and release management. He contributes to critical infrastructure projects such as libarchive—improving tests and core behavior—and maintains active work on Tarsnap, reflecting a strong focus on reliability, test coverage, and data protection. Known for expertise in algorithms, number theory, and computer security, he applies rigorous, research-quality thinking to production problems. Based in Burnaby, Canada, he also participates in community-facing roles like AWS Community Hero, bridging users and infrastructure. Colleagues rely on him for meticulous, security-minded releases and for uncovering subtle, correctness-oriented bugs that others often miss.
23 years of coding experience
1 year of employment as a software developer
D.Phil. Computer Science, D.Phil. Computer Science at University of OxfordB.Sc. Mathematics, B.Sc. Mathematics at Simon Fraser University
Github Skills (10)
c1710
archiving10
c1110
libarchive10
testing10
posixct8
filesystem8
posix8
software-quality7
debug7
Programming languages (7)
Github contributions (5)
libarchive/libarchive
Aug 2015 - Dec 2021
Multi-format archive and compression library
Role in this project:
Backend & Test Engineer
Backend & Test EngineerContributions:6 reviews, 25 commits, 42 PRs in 6 years 4 months
Contributions summary:Colin primarily contributed to the test suite and core functionality of the libarchive library. Their work involved adding new tests to verify correct handling of hard links, memory allocation, and file modes. Additionally, the user addressed code quality by removing dead code and fixing several spelling errors within the codebase. They also improved test coverage by adding and integrating assertion functions in various test suites, as well as enhancing tests by adding chmod calls.
multi-formatrarbz2backupposix
gperciva/artifastring
Dec 2010 - Apr 2014
Artifastring ("artificial fast string") is a highly optimized physical simulation of a violin for sound synthesis.
Contributions:174 commits, 1 comment in 3 years 4 months
sound-synthesissynthesizerstringviolinmidi
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