Dan Poltawski is a Systems Architect with 18 years of experience designing and operating resilient, cloud-native infrastructure and developer platforms from Lancaster, UK. He leads a small team at The Networking People, driving projects from Puppet-based configuration management and KVM/Ceph compute/storage to container platforms, anycast DNS and organisation-wide passwordless SSO. A former Moodle core developer and integrator, Dan has contributed significant back-end and Docker/Oracle integration work to the globally used open-source Moodle project, including schema and logging improvements that power large-scale learning deployments. He combines hands-on engineering (DevOps, database and PHP containerisation) with security-focused delivery—migrating monitoring to Prometheus, centralising logging with Loki and improving ISMS posture. Colleagues rely on him for pragmatic automation, network orchestration and bringing open-source best practices into production systems.
18 years of coding experience
12 years of employment as a software developer
2:1, Computer Science, 2:1, Computer Science at Lancaster University
Moodle - the world's open source learning platform
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Contributions:9536 commits, 31 PRs, 257 pushes in 10 years 7 months
Contributions summary:Dan's commits focus on modifying core Moodle files to improve server-side functionality. They introduced enhancements for logging user activity, particularly in managing access to modules. Contributions include adding features like improved group overrides, where student assignments can have individual start and end dates, with modifications to the database schema and related components, illustrating proficiency in back-end development and database interactions.
Contributions:99 commits, 36 PRs, 187 pushes in 8 months
Contributions summary:Dan's contributions center around automating and improving the Moodle Docker environment, specifically focusing on Oracle database integration and PHP configuration. They refactored PHP Docker files, implemented and refined Oracle database setup scripts, and addressed issues related to locales and PHP extensions. Furthermore, the user demonstrated expertise in configuring Docker Compose and managing PHP versions to streamline the development process.
docker-environmentmoodledocker
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Dan Poltawski - Systems Architect at The Networking People (TNP)