Kevin Menard
Senior Staff Engineer at Apache Cayenne
Holliston, Massachusetts, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolKevin Menard is a Senior Staff Engineer with 22 years of experience building high-performance language runtimes, developer tools, and cloud automation, currently leading work on TruffleRuby at Shopify. He combines deep systems and performance engineering—contributions span TruffleRuby, MRI/YJIT, JRuby, and notable open-source projects like Selenium and concurrent-ruby—with hands-on DevOps and deployment expertise. Kevin has founded and led multiple startups, served as Head of Engineering at CloudTruth through a funding round, and brings practical product instincts from shipping commercial and infrastructure products. He is an experienced open-source committer and PMC member (Apache Tapestry, Cayenne, Selenium), comfortable navigating large codebases and cross-project integrations. Beyond visible code, he frequently focuses on subtle platform details—string/encoding performance, FFI/platform compatibility, and robust test automation—that yield outsized runtime and developer productivity gains. Based in Holliston, MA, he pairs entrepreneurial grit with a track record of improving both core language internals and cloud deployment tooling.
22 years of coding experience
26 years of employment as a software developer
BS & MS Computer Science, BS & MS Computer Science at Worcester Polytechnic Institute
Stackoverflow
2,319reputation
181kreached
87answers
3questions
selenium
top-5%
Github Skills (106)
testing10
command-line-interface10
databases10
c1110
cffi10
ruby10
c1710
javas10
rxdb10
automation10
mspec10
subversion10
web-deployment10
foreign10
ffi10
Programming languages (28)
Github contributions (5)
rubber/rubber
Jun 2009 - Nov 2018
A capistrano/rails plugin that makes it easy to deploy/manage/scale to various service providers, including EC2, DigitalOcean, vSphere, and bare metal servers.
Role in this project:
DevOps & Backend Engineer
DevOps & Backend EngineerContributions:1 review, 976 commits, 18 PRs in 9 years 7 months
Contributions summary:Kevin primarily contributed to the infrastructure and deployment aspects of the project, utilizing Capistrano to manage the deployment process. They implemented new features such as enabling spot instances, support for persistent volumes, and integration of new services like Resque, indicating a focus on scaling and managing the application. Furthermore, they made code changes related to PostgreSQL and Redis, suggesting they also worked on backend infrastructure.
bare-metalmetalec2railsproviders
nirvdrum/svn2git
Nov 2008 - Oct 2016
Ruby tool for importing existing svn projects into git.
Role in this project:Back-end Developer & DevOps Engineer
Back-end Developer & DevOps EngineerContributions:181 commits, 5 PRs, 7 pushes in 8 years 1 month
Contributions summary:Kevin primarily contributed to the `svn2git` tool, which imports SVN projects into Git. Their work included fixing issues related to importing projects, changing how commands are run, and simplifying branching logic. They also implemented features like loading a default authors file and adding command-line option handling, along with refactoring code for clarity and maintainability. Furthermore, the user focused on improving the command execution and output handling, and ensuring all commands were handled correctly to allow the tool to handle edge cases.
importingrubysvngit-gui
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