Gerry Boland
Senior Software Engineer at Grafana Labs
Ireland
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolGerry Boland is a Senior Software Engineer with 14 years of experience blending deep mathematical physics expertise (PhD in Mathematical Physics) with practical systems and backend engineering. He has strong C/C++ skills and a history of building high-performance MPI simulations and porting applications to ARM and embedded Linux, while currently contributing to production-grade infrastructure at Grafana Labs. Gerry is an active open-source contributor to canonical projects like snapd and multipass, improving kernel-level security (AppArmor, kvm) and system orchestration behaviors such as cloud-init and networking. Comfortable across Python, PHP/MySQL, Bash and linux administration, he brings a rigorous, analytical approach from operator theory and functional analysis to debugging, security hardening, and performance tuning. He also has years of tutoring experience, translating complex mathematical and technical ideas into teachable solutions for students and peers.
14 years of coding experience
B.A., Mathematics, B.A., Mathematics at Trinity College DublinPhD, Mathematical Physics, PhD, Mathematical Physics at University College Dublin
Github Skills (18)
c-language10
apparmor10
it-security10
linux10
kernel-module10
virtual-machine10
security10
go10
cprogramming-language10
testing9
system-design9
go-testing9
system-administration9
networking8
dockers4
Programming languages (12)
Github contributions (5)
canonical/multipass
Oct 2018 - Sep 2019
Multipass orchestrates virtual Ubuntu instances
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer & System Administrator
Back-end Developer & System AdministratorContributions:106 commits, 56 PRs, 156 pushes in 11 months
Contributions summary:Gerry focused on enhancing the functionality of the `multipass` project, addressing issues related to file metadata, particularly within the sshfs module. They refactored the code to write to `/proc/sys` instead of using the `sysctl` tool, and also improved cloud-init configuration handling by enabling cloud-init config via stdin. The user also made modifications to networking setup, switching from bash scripts to code for subnet determination and reducing warning levels.
hyper-vorchestratesinstancesvdivirtual-machine
canonical/snapd
Mar 2018 - Mar 2019
The snapd and snap tools enable systems to work with .snap files.
Role in this project:Back-end & Security Engineer
Back-end & Security EngineerContributions:7 commits, 10 PRs, 98 comments in 11 months
Contributions summary:Gerry focused on enhancing the `snapd` project's security and functionality. They implemented AppArmor rules for the `content` and `multipass-support` interfaces, enabling secure access control for snap applications. Additionally, the user contributed to the `kvm` interface, improving kernel module loading based on CPU capabilities, and added tests to validate its behavior. These contributions highlight a focus on system-level security and the management of low-level system resources.
snapdsnap
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