David Tolnay
Maintenance Supervisor at University at Buffalo
Buffalo, New York, United States
Summary
🤩
RockstarDavid Tolnay is an experienced Maintenance Supervisor based in Buffalo, NY with 34 years of practical leadership overseeing roughly 3,000 dorm rooms and apartments at the University at Buffalo. Though his day job centers on facilities operations, he is also a prolific open-source software contributor with deep expertise in Rust—authoring and improving widely used crates like cxx, thiserror, proc-macro tooling, and contributions to core projects such as rustc, clippy, and serde. He blends systems-level thinking with hands-on engineering, having tackled parsing, macro expansion, FFI, serialization, and deployment/CI automation across many projects. David’s work shows unusual breadth: from infrastructure and Terraform reliability fixes to delicate compiler and macro implementations, demonstrating both reliability-first pragmatism and language-level craftsmanship. Colleagues can expect a pragmatic problem-solver who moves comfortably between operational leadership and low-level code quality improvements.
34 years of coding experience
Stackoverflow
10,302reputation
582kreached
100answers
0questions
json
top-1%
macros
top-5%
debugging
top-5%
rust
top-1%
struct
top-5%
code-generation
top-5%
Github Skills (160)
dependency-management10
parser10
cargo10
jsonb10
compiler-development10
testing10
data-manipulation10
bash10
c1110
terraform10
security10
c1710
type-system10
deserialization10
automation10
Programming languages (21)
Github contributions (5)
dtolnay/proc-macro-workshop
Mar 2019 - Dec 2022
Learn to write Rust procedural macros [Rust Latam conference, Montevideo Uruguay, March 2019]
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:10 reviews, 102 commits, 35 PRs in 3 years 9 months
Contributions summary:David contributed significantly to the development of a test runner for Rust procedural macros, including implementing the core functionalities such as preparing test environments, running tests, and checking test results. The commits demonstrate the user's focus on building and managing testing infrastructure within the project. The work involves setting up the build environment and interacting with Cargo, showcasing expertise in Rust and related tooling.
rust
serde-rs/json
Feb 2016 - Jan 2023
Strongly typed JSON library for Rust
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:174 releases, 156 reviews, 1099 commits in 7 years
Contributions summary:David's contributions primarily focused on enhancing the functionality and efficiency of the serde-json library for Rust. They introduced improvements to integer and floating-point serialization, utilizing faster algorithms and techniques. The user also implemented support for deserialization of various data structures including `&str`, `&[u8]`, and 128-bit integers, extending the library's capabilities for handling a broader range of JSON data. Furthermore, the user made changes to facilitate better parsing and error handling within the library.
ruststrongly-typedserdejson
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