John Dickinson
Distinguished Engineer at NVIDIA
San Francisco, California, United States
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolJohn Dickinson is a Distinguished Engineer with 17 years of experience building and scaling cloud storage and data platforms, currently advancing storage work at NVIDIA from San Francisco. As an original author and long-time technical lead of OpenStack Swift, he has deep expertise delivering high-quality, massively scalable object storage both as open-source software and as a sellable product at SwiftStack. He combines hands-on backend engineering—ranging from core stats systems and client authentication improvements to operational tooling—with community leadership, having grown Swift to hundreds of contributors and coordinated global releases. A practical bridge between engineering and customer needs, he has led teams, shaped roadmaps, and supported sales and field engagements to turn open-source technology into deployed systems. Notably, his career blends public-facing community stewardship with low-level fixes and tooling that keep large-scale storage systems reliable in production.
17 years of coding experience
20 years of employment as a software developer
BA, University Scholars, Computer Science, BA, University Scholars, Computer Science at Baylor University
Github Skills (12)
openstack10
python10
openstack-swift10
back-end-development10
documentation9
apidoc9
rest-api9
api9
user-authentication8
error-handling8
authentication8
testing8
Programming languages (8)
Github contributions (5)
openstack/swift
Jul 2010 - Oct 2019
OpenStack Storage (Swift). Mirror of code maintained at opendev.org.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:555 commits in 9 years 4 months
Contributions summary:John's contributions focused on fixing bugs and making minor improvements in the OpenStack Swift storage system. Their work involved correcting comma syntax in the `setup.py` file and fixing various typos in the documentation, specifically on the development SAIO (Swift All in One) and overview architecture pages. The user also worked on core functionality with the "initial stats system commit", which included adding a log uploader and implementing stats plugins. This suggests the user had some experience with backend development within the project.
openstackswift
openstack/python-swiftclient
Nov 2012 - Feb 2019
OpenStack Storage (Swift) Client. Mirror of code maintained at opendev.org.
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:29 commits in 6 years 4 months
Contributions summary:John primarily contributed to the `python-swiftclient` project by implementing features related to error handling, authentication, and improving the client's functionality. They addressed rate-limiting issues by adding retry mechanisms and fixed SSL certificate handling. The contributions also included refactoring code to match project's coding standards and improving the user interface by setting user-agent header.
openstackswift
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