Dave Lester
Senior Product Manager, Swift at Apple
San Francisco, California, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolDave Lester is a Senior Product Manager at Apple leading Swift developer-focused products with 19 years of engineering and community-building experience. He blends hands-on back-end and full-stack development—contributing to notable open-source projects like Apache Mesos and Mozilla Open Badges—with product strategy that helps scale developer ecosystems. Known for translating technical complexity into consumable ideas, he has shipped improvements ranging from cgroup/OOM handling in Mesos to Open Graph integrations for badge sharing. A frequent speaker and community organizer, he pairs curiosity with practical engineering chops and a habit of wearing many hats. Based in San Francisco, he leverages a UC Berkeley master’s foundation and a long track record of open-source contributions to inform product decisions. Notably, his background spans both deep systems work and developer tooling, giving him rare empathy for the needs of platform users and maintainers.
19 years of coding experience
Masters Degree, Masters Degree at University of California, BerkeleyBachelor of Arts - BA, Bachelor of Arts - BA at St. John Fisher College
Github Skills (25)
mesos10
javascript10
c-language10
facebook-api10
cloud-computing10
memory-management10
php10
xml10
rest-api10
cprogramming-language10
cgroups10
zend-framework9
css9
nunjucks9
html9
Programming languages (12)
Github contributions (5)
apache/mesos
Nov 2014 - Jun 2022
Apache Mesos
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer & DevOps Engineer
Back-end Developer & DevOps EngineerContributions:6 commits, 2 PRs, 9 comments in 7 years 8 months
Contributions summary:Dave's commits indicate a focus on the back-end development of the Apache Mesos project, specifically addressing issues related to cgroup isolator functionality, memory management, and out-of-memory (OOM) handling within the Mesos core. The commits involve modifying core C++ code, including implementing OOM detection, resource limits, and integration with cgroups. Additionally, the changes include example code for memory management.
apachebig-datacloudmesosjava
omeka/Omeka
May 2007 - Jul 2009
A flexible web publishing platform for the display of library, museum and scholarly collections, archives and exhibitions.
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:84 commits in 2 years 1 month
Contributions summary:Dave primarily focused on back-end development, specifically working on the Omeka platform's REST API and related functionalities. They implemented and modified code for XML output, including browse and show pages for items and tags, using PHP. Additionally, they addressed bugs related to the authentication process and file handling, enhancing the platform's usability and functionality.
publishingopen-accessexhibitionspublishing-platformscholarly
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