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 (162)
dependency-management10
parser10
cargo10
jsonb10
compiler-development10
testing10
data-manipulation10
bash10
c1110
terraform10
security10
c1710
type-system10
deserialization10
automation10
Programming languages (24)
Github contributions (5)
dtolnay/syn
Sep 2016 - Jan 2023
Parser for Rust source code
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:335 releases, 92 reviews, 3388 commits in 6 years 5 months
Contributions summary:David primarily focused on updating and generating code related to Rust source code parsing, particularly within the `syn` repository. Their work involved updating generated code, implementing changes related to patterns, and general code updates, which suggests involvement in the library's core functionality. These updates included fixes for handling edge cases, adjustments to parsing logic, and improvements to the codebase to align with the project's direction.
rustproc-macroparsingparser-generatorpeg
dtolnay/thiserror
Oct 2019 - Dec 2022
derive(Error) for struct and enum error types
Role in this project:Back-end Developer & Library Author
Back-end Developer & Library AuthorContributions:82 releases, 47 reviews, 387 commits in 3 years 3 months
Contributions summary:David's primary contributions revolve around the development and enhancement of the `thiserror` library, a Rust crate for deriving `Error` implementations. They implemented a proc macro to generate `Error` implementations for structs and enums, enabling features like the `source()` method for accessing underlying error causes and the `backtrace()` method. They also added support for handling the `#[from]` attribute for automatic `From` implementations and handled display traits for structs and enums.
errorderiveenumstruct
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