Joe Mcilvain
Principal Infrastructure Engineer at Movable Ink
Concrete, Washington, United States
Summary
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RockstarJoe Mcilvain is a Principal Infrastructure Engineer with 13 years of experience building resilient distributed systems, orchestration, and language/runtime tooling, now leading infrastructure at Movable Ink. A polyglot and passionate open-source contributor, he has improved core projects like ZeroMQ, Pony, and Rubinius—adding critical runtime fixes, Android/Qt build systems, and CI improvements that underscore his systems-level craftsmanship. Joe combines hands-on engineering with compassionate technical leadership, regularly unblocking teams while aligning technical and non-technical stakeholders toward pragmatic solutions. Not afraid to question assumptions, he specializes in finding root causes and shipping durable fixes across diverse tech stacks used by Fortune 500 clients. Based in Concrete, Washington, he brings a rare blend of compiler-level insight and production-grade DevOps experience that surfaces in both code and process.
13 years of coding experience
10 years of employment as a software developer
Github Skills (41)
spec10
programming-language10
c-language10
zeromq10
strings10
qt10
testing10
text-manipulation10
bash10
mq10
virtual-machine10
android-build10
c1110
networking10
cicd10
Programming languages (29)
Github contributions (5)
ponylang/ponyc
Jul 2015 - Nov 2022
Pony is an open-source, actor-model, capabilities-secure, high performance programming language
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:233 reviews, 197 commits, 664 PRs in 7 years 5 months
Contributions summary:Joe made significant contributions to the Pony language's core libraries, specifically focusing on network and string manipulation. They implemented new methods for the `net/Buffer` library, enabling more efficient parsing of protocols that encode data with lengths. They also added default values to several string methods in the `builtin` library, improving usability. Furthermore, they fixed a critical bug in the `os_accept` function of the Pony runtime, preventing an infinite loop and reducing system churn.
securehorseponyponycpony-source
zeromq/libzmq
May 2014 - Jun 2017
ZeroMQ core engine in C++, implements ZMTP/3.1
Role in this project:Backend & DevOps Engineer
Backend & DevOps EngineerContributions:47 commits, 39 PRs, 30 pushes in 3 years 1 month
Contributions summary:Joe contributed to the project by addressing both backend and build system issues. They added a new test case to reproduce a race condition in the core engine. The user also implemented a build system for qt-android and fixed existing issues with the qt-android build process. Furthermore, they addressed code quality by removing tabs and trailing whitespace and by removing a type-pun from zmq.cpp.
concurrencyzeromqnetworkingstreampushpull
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