Mark Syms
Staff Software Engineer at XenServer
Cambridge, England, United Kingdom
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolMark Syms is a Staff Software Engineer based in Cambridge with 11 years of focused experience building low-level, pragmatic distributed service systems that power application and desktop virtualization for enterprise and cloud customers. He has a long tenure at Citrix/XenServer where he acted as component lead and technical design authority for provisioning, hypervisor management, storage and datapath, and now continues that work at XenServer. A generalist who thrives at the frontier between systems and services, Mark contributes deep backend expertise—evidenced by substantial commits to the Xapi XenAPI server such as SR multipath, Volume.copy and storage/device improvements—and practical DevOps tooling enhancements in projects like the Jenkins job-dsl plugin. Trained as an MEng in Microelectronic Systems Engineering, he blends hardware-aware systems thinking with decades of Unix and networked storage experience to deliver robust, performance-oriented solutions.
11 years of coding experience
28 years of employment as a software developer
Master of Engineering (MEng), Microelectronic Systems Engineering, Master of Engineering (MEng), Microelectronic Systems Engineering at The University of Manchester
Stackoverflow
11reputation
7kreached
0answers
1question
Github Skills (21)
xapi10
filesystem10
groovy10
dsl10
storage10
ocaml10
jenkins-plugin10
jenkins10
jenkins-ci10
python9
automation9
automations9
powershell9
system-administration8
cicd8
Programming languages (14)
Github contributions (5)
xapi-project/xen-api
May 2016 - Oct 2022
The Xapi Project's XenAPI Server
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:49 reviews, 22 commits, 24 PRs in 6 years 6 months
Contributions summary:Mark Syms primarily contributed to the backend aspects of the XenAPI project. His work involved implementing new features such as SR multipath and the Volume.copy API, alongside modifying the string formatting for better Unicode handling. He addressed critical bug fixes, including handling O_DIRECT errors and setting the NBD device scheduler. Furthermore, he made substantial changes to the system's storage and device management, demonstrating a focus on improving performance and functionality.
xapi
jenkinsci/job-dsl-plugin
Apr 2015 - Apr 2015
A Groovy DSL for Jenkins Jobs
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:8 commits, 6 PRs in 14 days
Contributions summary:Mark primarily contributed to the `job-dsl-plugin`, enhancing its functionality by adding support for new features, such as PowerShell build steps and upstream triggers. Their commits involved modifying the Groovy DSL to incorporate new options and features of the plugin, and adding comprehensive options for existing features. They also addressed deprecation warnings and improved existing features.
dslgroovyjenkins-jobsjenkins
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