David Anderson
Software Engineer at Tailscale
Victoria, British Columbia, Canada
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolDavid Anderson is a seasoned software engineer with 19 years of experience specializing in networking, systems, and back-end engineering, currently building core infrastructure at Tailscale. His career includes multiple senior SRE and engineering roles at Google and a senior site reliability position at Tock, reflecting deep expertise in production-grade distributed systems. He is an active open-source contributor with notable work on Tailscale, MetalLB, and Go projects like go-qemu and go-sqlite3, often tackling low-level networking, protocol parsing, and code-generation challenges. David frequently contributes pragmatic fixes and new features—IPv6, ACME routing, PROXY protocol support, DHCP/TFTP handling, and SQLite function extensions—that improve interoperability and observability. Based in Victoria, BC, he combines systems-thinking with hands-on coding, preferring elegant, maintainable solutions to tricky networking problems. A less obvious strength is his history of producing tooling and parsers that turn complex protocol specs into reliable, typed implementations, reducing downstream developer friction.
19 years of coding experience
14 years of employment as a software developer
baccalaureate, baccalaureate at Saint Andrémasters, masters at Université de Technologie de Belfort-Montbéliard
English, French
Github Skills (43)
algorithm10
algorithms10
ip-address10
kubernetes10
parser10
tls1210
sqlite10
data-validation10
testing10
ip10
databases10
acme10
tls1310
networking10
network-programming10
Programming languages (24)
Github contributions (5)
danderson/netboot
Feb 2016 - Jun 2020
Packages and utilities for network booting
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:4 reviews, 257 commits, 55 PRs in 4 years 4 months
Contributions summary:David primarily contributed to the development of the `netboot` repository, focusing on network booting tools and packages. Their contributions include implementing core functionality for the TFTP server, incorporating a basic pcap reader and writer, and adding the ability to handle DHCP requests by implementing the parsing, marshaling, and unmarshalling of DHCP packets. Additionally, the user implemented the foundation for a Linux-specific connection type.
bootingospfnetworkingsdntpm
inetaf/tcpproxy
Nov 2016 - Jul 2017
Proxy TCP connections based on static rules, HTTP Host headers, and SNI server names (Go package or binary)
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:4 reviews, 49 commits, 19 PRs in 7 months
Contributions summary:David primarily focused on enhancing the tcpproxy project, a Go-based TCP proxy. Their contributions include implementing ACME routing support for TLS connections, adding support for HAProxy's PROXY protocol for more transparent connections, and implementing security measures such as a client hello timeout. They also added features like DNS name support to the configuration and fixed errors in the Go code. Furthermore, the user refactored code and refactored the tcpproxy codebase.
golanggo-packageproxyhostsni
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