Don Brady
Software Engineer
Colorado, United States
Summary
🤩
RockstarDon Brady is a software engineer based in Colorado with 11 years of experience and a deep specialty in ZFS development dating back to 2006. He has contributed significant backend and system-architecture work to illumos and OpenZFS, improving metaslab sizing, ARC memory behavior, raidz expansion, NVMe device support, and fault-injection tooling for robust testing. His hands-on kernel and filesystem changes show a focus on low-level performance, reliability, and maintainability in production storage stacks. Notably, he has implemented features that enable safer testing and operational control—such as corruption injection and signal-handling for channel programs—highlighting an engineer who balances invasive system work with practical operational needs.
11 years of coding experience
Stackoverflow
181reputation
13kreached
3answers
0questions
Github Skills (26)
filesystem10
il10
unix10
system-programming10
memory-management10
c-programming10
c1110
c1710
kernel10
zfs10
kernel-mode10
operating-system10
performance-optimization9
sys9
system9
Programming languages (5)
Github contributions (5)
openzfs/zfs
Aug 2017 - Sep 2022
OpenZFS on Linux and FreeBSD
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer & System Architect
Back-end Developer & System ArchitectContributions:272 reviews, 44 commits, 76 PRs in 5 years 1 month
Contributions summary:Don primarily contributed to the development and enhancement of the OpenZFS file system. Their work included implementing a corruption failure option to the `zinject` tool, which allows injecting errors for testing and validation. They also refactored and added functionality to the ZFS kernel module, addressed build regressions, and added support for NVMe-based device identifiers. Furthermore, they added support for raidz expansion, significantly improving ZFS's capabilities.
openzfstarballlinuxfreebsdsystem-software
illumos/illumos-gate
Aug 2017 - Jun 2020
An open-source Unix operating system
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:6 commits in 2 years 10 months
Contributions summary:Don primarily worked on the ZFS codebase, focusing on improving and optimizing its internal workings. Their commits involved modifying core system files, addressing issues related to metaslab sizing, memory management, and ARC (Adaptive Replacement Cache) behavior within ZFS. Additionally, the user contributed to the ZFS channel program, allowing channel programs to be stopped via signals and fixing an fd release.
unixkerneloperating-systemlinuxillumos
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