Derek Mcgowan
Software Engineer at Docker, Inc
Greater Sacramento United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top School
Top expert inCloud-Native DevOps with Kubernetes
Derek Mcgowan is a software engineer with 14 years of experience specializing in container, registry, and build infrastructure, currently working at Docker after a spell at Apple. He is an active open-source maintainer (notably of containerd) and contributor to flagship projects in the Docker/Moby ecosystem, including docker/cli, distribution, buildkit, and moby/moby where he implemented registry v2.1, signed image support, and content-trust integrations. His work spans backend systems, DevOps, and build tooling—improving image handling, snapshotter contexts, dependency integration, and performance-sensitive refactors. Earlier in his career he built large-scale backend systems and mobile apps at Plaxo and as a startup co-founder, giving him practical full-stack and ops experience. Colleagues rely on him for code-quality improvements and practical security/trust features that bridge developer UX and registry protocols. He’s based in Greater Sacramento and brings a rare combination of hands-on systems engineering and long-term stewardship of critical open-source container infrastructure.
13 years of coding experience
16 years of employment as a software developer
San Diego State University
Github Skills (42)
dependency-management10
container10
docker10
buildkite10
back-end-development10
apidoc10
testing10
authentication10
user-authentication10
data-serialization10
distributed-systems10
dockers10
serialization10
security10
occi10
Programming languages (13)
Github contributions (5)
docker/libchan
Jun 2014 - May 2016
Like Go channels over the network
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:67 commits, 43 PRs, 17 pushes in 1 year 10 months
Contributions summary:Derek's contributions focused on enhancing the functionality of the `libchan` library by adding features related to message encoding and decoding using the msgpack format. They modified several test files to incorporate these encoding and decoding capabilities, demonstrating the integration of msgpack for data serialization. Moreover, the user refactored the message structure, incorporating the use of `io.ReadWriteCloser` and created new in-memory implementations to support the updated interfaces.
golangchannelswebsocketgo
distribution/distribution
Sep 2014 - Mar 2021
The toolkit to pack, ship, store, and deliver container content
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:6 releases, 7 reviews, 514 commits in 6 years 6 months
Contributions summary:Derek primarily contributed to the core functionality of the distribution/distribution repository, focusing on enhancing the registry v2 specification with features like provenance pull flow and the support for signed images. Their work involved implementing new API endpoints for blob uploads, adding methods to retrieve image manifests, and updating the codebase to align with the registry 2.1 specification. They also refactored existing code for improved performance and added a token cache mechanism.
containersshipdockerdelivercncf
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