Ethan Jackson
PHD Student at UC Berkeley
Mountain View, California, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolEthan Jackson is a PhD student at UC Berkeley and a seasoned networking and systems engineer with 15 years of experience building production-grade cloud and virtual networking software. He founded and led Kelda Blimp to simplify developer workflows for scalable cloud environments and has held senior roles at Google, Nicira/VMware, and Aviatrix where he focused on networking platforms and research. Ethan is a core open-source contributor to projects like Open vSwitch and XenAPI, adding advanced features such as BFD support, VLAN/tunnel improvements, and robust network-bonding controls that improve reliability at the hypervisor level. He blends deep low-level systems expertise with product leadership, routinely moving ideas from kernel and control-plane code into deployable infrastructure. Based in Mountain View, he pairs academic rigor—advised by Scott Shenker—with practical operational experience, making him equally at home prototyping research and shipping resilient network software.
15 years of coding experience
14 years of employment as a software developer
Doctor of Philosophy Student (Ph.D.) , Computer Science, Doctor of Philosophy Student (Ph.D.) , Computer Science at University of California, BerkeleyBS, Computer Science, BS, Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University
Github Skills (23)
bfd10
xapi10
network-configuration10
tunnel10
python10
c-programming10
bonds10
linux-kernel10
binding10
kernel10
bond10
device-driver10
driver10
network-protocol10
tunneling10
Programming languages (9)
Github contributions (5)
xapi-project/xen-api
Sep 2010 - Aug 2011
The Xapi Project's XenAPI Server
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:22 commits in 10 months
Contributions summary:Ethan primarily contributed to the `InterfaceReconfigureVswitch.py` script, focusing on enhancing the Xapi project's XenAPI server. Their contributions included adding support for bond_mode, miimon, and LACP configurations, enabling more flexible network bonding options through standard XenServer commands. The user also worked on improving the handling of fail_mode settings for network configurations, addressing potential crashes and incorporating network-level overrides. Their work directly impacts network configuration and stability within the XenAPI environment.
xenapixapi
openvswitch/ovs
Mar 2015 - Nov 2015
Open vSwitch
Role in this project:Back-end & Systems Engineer
Back-end & Systems EngineerContributions:25 pushes in 8 months
Contributions summary:Ethan primarily contributed to the core functionality of Open vSwitch, demonstrating expertise in network device interaction, and low-level system programming. They focused on improving and debugging tunnel support and VLAN functionality, demonstrating a deep understanding of network protocols and data structures. They also introduced and maintained the addition of BFD support, demonstrating advanced networking knowledge.
twitch
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