John Lenton is a seasoned Staff Engineer with 18 years of experience building robust back-end systems, security-focused tooling, and automation for cloud and IoT platforms. Based in Epsom and Ewell, he has held senior and leadership roles at Canonical, ShiftLeft, Qwiet AI, and now Harness, combining hands-on engineering with build/release and security responsibilities. A prolific open-source contributor, his work spans high-impact projects like Canonical's snapd and snapcraft and MicroPython, where he improved core functionality, security, and interoperability for constrained devices. He brings a rare mix of systems-level security awareness and practical build/test automation鈥攁ble to refactor APIs, harden key flows, and streamline CI/CD across large codebases. As a long-time maintainer and occasional entrepreneur (Chipaca Ltd, Except), he pairs production-grade engineering with an appreciation for developer experience and durable, testable designs.
The snapd and snap tools enable systems to work with .snap files.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer & Security Engineer
Contributions:1 review, 2687 commits, 1348 PRs in 5 years 2 months
Contributions summary:John appears to be a back-end developer focusing on the core functionality and security of the snapd project. The commits show significant involvement in refactoring and improving the handling of health checks, user administration, and the API for managing snaps. The contributions include implementing features for the creation of cohorts and ensuring system-level security through changes such as adding and verifying key security attributes. They also addressed several areas related to API endpoints.
Package, distribute, and update any app for Linux and IoT.
Role in this project:
Automation Engineer / Build & Release Engineer
Contributions:11 commits, 10 PRs, 1 push in 3 years 4 months
Contributions summary:John primarily focused on improving the build and testing infrastructure of the `snapcraft` project. Their contributions included enhancing the debugging output with version information, adapting and improving the store test suite, and integrating broader Shellcheck validation. The user also addressed issues related to snap name validation, which suggests a contribution towards build process and release quality. They were also responsible for replacing yaml.safe_load with CSafeLoader and pulling in improved cla_check.py from snapd.
snapslinuxupdatesnapdistribute
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