Manuel De La Pena
Software Engineer at Motion
Miami, Florida, United States
Summary
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Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolManuel De La Pena is a software engineer with 15 years of experience building robust cross-platform systems, currently based in Miami and now at Motion after a multi-year tenure at Microsoft. He specializes in code generation, interoperability, multiplatform programming and Unix, with deep practical experience shipping iOS and macOS support for large open-source .NET projects like Mono, .NET MAUI and the dotnet/macios bindings. Manuel’s work blends backend and test automation expertise—he has a track record of hardening async I/O, improving thread-safety, and making test harnesses more resilient (including network tunneling for device tests). He previously enabled platform-level features at Canonical, integrating mobile positioning and filesystem event plumbing across Linux, Windows and macOS. Comfortable in C#, Objective-C and systems-level C/C++ code, he prefers pragmatic, safety-focused changes that improve developer experience and long-term maintainability. A subtle differentiator is his habit of pairing UI/UX-minded fixes with low-level test and stability improvements, bridging product polish and platform reliability.
15 years of coding experience
15 years of employment as a software developer
2:I, Bsc (Hons) Computer Science, 2:I, Bsc (Hons) Computer Science at The University of Manchester
English, Spanish
Stackoverflow
1reputation
0reached
0answers
0questions
Github Skills (28)
ios10
net10
dotnet10
user-interface10
asp-net10
dotnet-core10
mobile10
csharp10
test-automation10
async9
asynchronous9
unit-testing9
netframework9
xamarin9
nunit9
Programming languages (11)
Github contributions (5)
mono/mono
Apr 2017 - Feb 2022
Mono open source ECMA CLI, C# and .NET implementation.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer & Test Automation Engineer
Back-end Developer & Test Automation EngineerContributions:41 commits, 32 PRs, 60 comments in 4 years 10 months
Contributions summary:Manuel primarily focused on enhancing the robustness and thread safety of the `mono/mono` repository, making changes to the `CFContentStream.cs` file to address network errors and ensure correct error handling in asynchronous read tasks. They also addressed bugs in existing tests, specifically fixing `Mono.Data.Tds` tests on iOS and resolving issues related to file access and temp files in the `System.IO.Compression.FileSystem` and `System.IO.Compression` tests. Furthermore, the user added conditional compilation directives to run only a subset of `System.Security` tests on mobile platforms and skipped various tests related to System.ServiceModel and System.IdentityModel for iOS and Mac devices, likely related to platform-specific limitations.
dotnetjitruntimemonoandroid
dotnet/macios
May 2016 - Jan 2023
.NET for iOS, Mac Catalyst, macOS, and tvOS provide open-source bindings of the Apple SDKs for use with .NET managed languages such as C#
Role in this project:Back-end Developer & Test Automation Engineer
Back-end Developer & Test Automation EngineerContributions:4499 reviews, 1853 commits, 4626 PRs in 6 years 9 months
Contributions summary:Manuel's contributions focused on refactoring and improving the test code, specifically within the `xharness` test framework. The commits refactored XML parsing code, added the ability to use a test label, addressed potential crashing issues related to networking and application launch, and added new automated tests. They also added support to create tunnels in case the devices cannot connect to the host, enhancing test execution robustness. The user also enhanced GitHub status and added several features and enhancements to the existing tests.
dotnettvoscsharpiosxamarin
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