Dustin Cowles
Senior Software Engineer at Instructure
Portland, Oregon, United States
Summary
👤
SeniorDustin Cowles is a senior full-stack software engineer based in Portland, Oregon, with eight years of professional experience building and maintaining cloud-native applications and education platforms. He brings deep hands-on experience across Ruby on Rails, JavaScript/React, and Python (Django/Flask), and a strong operational background with AWS, Azure, Kubernetes, and Terraform. At Instructure he contributes to Canvas LMS full-stack features and UX fixes, while his prior roles at Intel and Certica emphasized scalable cloud services, entitlement/update platforms, and DevOps automation. An active open-source contributor, Dustin has improved OpenStack Nova by refactoring it to use the openstacksdk—simplifying service interactions and increasing maintainability. Comfortable spanning product-facing front-end work to low-level cloud integrations, he pairs pragmatic engineering with experience driving community-backed feature development. Colleagues rely on him for steady cross-discipline delivery and practical improvements that reduce long-term maintenance burden.
8 years of coding experience
13 years of employment as a software developer
English
Stackoverflow
996reputation
345kreached
4answers
1question
shell
top-5%
Github Skills (25)
openstack-sdk10
python10
back-end-development10
rails10
activerecord10
backend10
ruby-on-rails10
javascript9
apidoc9
api9
react9
shell9
uid8
front-end-development8
ui-design8
Programming languages (7)
Github contributions (5)
instructure/canvas-lms
May 2021 - Oct 2022
The open LMS by Instructure, Inc.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer & Frontend Developer
Back-end Developer & Frontend DeveloperContributions:61 commits, 6 PRs, 16 comments in 1 year 5 months
Contributions summary:Dustin primarily contributed to the backend logic of the application by modifying Ruby on Rails code related to submission comments and media upload handling. They updated database interactions and improved error handling for media submissions. Additionally, the user modified frontend UI components using Javascript and React for the assignment view, specifically focusing on the button text and visibility. These contributions are primarily bug fixes and UX improvements.
open-lmsinstructurecanvas-lmslmsinc
openstack/nova
Apr 2019 - Nov 2019
OpenStack Compute (Nova). Mirror of code maintained at opendev.org.
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:9 commits in 7 months
Contributions summary:Dustin's primary contribution focuses on refactoring the OpenStack Nova compute service to utilize the openstacksdk library, replacing the older keystoneauth1 and python-*client dependencies. This involved implementing a `get_sdk_adapter` method to construct authenticated SDK connection objects. Furthermore, the user updated the code to use the SDK for tasks like listing nodes and validating instances, as demonstrated by modifications to the ironic driver. These changes indicate a shift towards utilizing OpenStack SDK for interaction with other services, potentially simplifying operations and improving maintainability.
novaopendevopenstackcompute
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