Derek Nola
Staff Software Engineer at SUSE
San Jose, California, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolDerek Nola is a Staff Software Engineer with 11 years of experience focused on low-level systems, parallel programming, and container infrastructure, currently working on K3s and RKE2 at SUSE. He brings deep hands-on expertise in build/release automation, CI/CD, testing and provisioning—evidenced by contributions that added integration and E2E test frameworks, hardened install scripts, and dependency updates for lightweight Kubernetes distributions. Previously at Arista he delivered performance-critical networking features in modern C++, Go, and Python, including kernel modules and packet-processing integrations. Based in San Jose, he pairs production-grade engineering with an educator’s knack for clear documentation and testing, and is an active open-source contributor to prominent projects like k3s/rke2. Outside work he’s a dedicated Yosemite visitor, which reflects a consistent, disciplined approach to balancing intense technical focus with restorative time in the outdoors.
11 years of coding experience
6 years of employment as a software developer
California Polytechnic State University, San Luis ObispoClovis North Highschool
Github Skills (15)
kubernetes10
go10
kubernetes-pods10
cicd10
testing10
vagrant9
automation9
automations9
containerd9
bash8
etcd8
iptables7
docker6
devops6
dockers6
Programming languages (14)
Github contributions (5)
k3s-io/k3s
Jun 2021 - Jan 2023
Lightweight Kubernetes
Role in this project:
Back-end & DevOps Engineer
Back-end & DevOps EngineerContributions:36 releases, 1294 reviews, 275 commits in 1 year 7 months
Contributions summary:Derek's contributions primarily involve modifying and improving the k3s Kubernetes distribution. They focused on fixing issues related to container cloud-controller-manager, and fixing issues related to iptables versions, containing image leases, and changing local storage pods permission. The user also worked on refactoring the core, including adding a new test for the etcd module. Moreover, the user made improvements to the build process and CI/CD pipelines.
k3dcloudfoundryk8skuberneteskubelet
rancher/rke2
Jun 2021 - Jan 2023
Role in this project:DevOps Engineer
DevOps EngineerContributions:17 releases, 608 reviews, 139 commits in 1 year 7 months
Contributions summary:Derek's contributions primarily involve modifications to the RKE2 project's build and deployment process. They updated dependencies in `go.mod` to incorporate the latest K3s releases. They also introduced an integration test framework, added test documentation, and implemented an E2E (End-to-End) validation test. Furthermore, the user made adjustments to the install scripts, and included secrets encryption CLI. These changes suggest a focus on improving the project's build, testing, and release processes.
Find and Hire Top DevelopersWe’ve analyzed the programming source code of over 60 million software developers on GitHub and scored them by 50,000 skills. Sign-up on Prog,AI to search for software developers.