Dale Hamel is a systems-focused software engineer with 13 years of experience designing and operating infrastructure from Raspberry Pi-class devices to multi-million dollar supercomputing clusters and large public cloud deployments. A former manager and manager-of-managers who recently returned to IC work, he specializes in systems performance analysis and eBPF/BPF tooling, with notable contributions to bpftrace that earned acknowledgment in Brendan Gregg’s BPF Performance Tools. At Shopify he has led production foundations work and contributed to core reliability libraries and deployment tooling, while also improving Kubernetes tracing workflows (kubectl-trace) and BCC build/test automation. He blends low-level C/C++ and tracing expertise with practical DevOps and deployment experience—tuning semaphores in Ruby libraries, refining USDT probe handling, and hardening containerized builds. Based in Ottawa and not open to US relocation, he prefers remote or Canada-based roles and continues to publish writings and code around USDT tracing and eBPF.
13 years of coding experience
Honors computer science, co-op option, first class honors, Computer science, 3.89, Honors computer science, co-op option, first class honors, Computer science, 3.89 at University of Manitoba
Schedule bpftrace programs on your kubernetes cluster using the kubectl
Role in this project:
DevOps Engineer
Contributions:13 reviews, 55 commits, 48 PRs in 2 years 6 months
Contributions summary:Dale primarily focused on improving the project's infrastructure and deployment process. Their contributions include adding resource requests and limits to trace jobs and initContainers within the Kubernetes environment, crucial for efficient resource management. They implemented the installation of container OS linux headers via initContainer, enabling the correct operation of tracing within the Kubernetes cluster. Furthermore, they introduced a pre-stop hook to print maps before exiting the process and enhanced the build and release processes.
:monkey: Resiliency toolkit for Ruby for failing fast
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Contributions:1 review, 47 commits, 80 PRs in 4 months
Contributions summary:Dale primarily focused on low-level system programming and resource management within the Ruby-based `semian` library. Their contributions involved refactoring and optimizing semaphore operations using SysV semaphores. The user implemented core features like the ability to unregister workers and exposed metrics on those workers. In addition, the user updated the project's build and install scripts, making the codebase more robust and portable across multiple platforms.
circuit-breakerwebscalerailsresiliencymonkey
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