Mike Purvis
Principal DevOps Engineer at Simbe
Waterloo, Ontario, Canada
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolMike Purvis is a Principal DevOps Engineer with 14 years of experience building and shipping robotics software and hardware, currently shaping build and deployment for large fleets of RaaS units. He blends deep hands‑on C++ and Python expertise in ROS with leadership in DevOps, Debian/Nix packaging, and CI automation to drive reproducible, declarative delivery pipelines. Mike has led major migrations—Python 3 and Ubuntu LTS upgrades—and introduced a Nix mindset to container and infrastructure workflows to improve developer productivity and reliability. His open-source contributions span core ROS projects (ros_control, ros_comm, rosserial) and device drivers, demonstrating systems-level rigor from joystick teleop to camera and serial drivers. Equally comfortable refactoring C++ interfaces and authoring test suites as he is managing firmware-to-cloud release flows, he brings a pragmatic focus on performance, memory safety (C++17/Rust), and measurable operational improvements.
14 years of coding experience
17 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor of Applied Science (B.A.Sc.), Mechatronics Engineering, Bachelor of Applied Science (B.A.Sc.), Mechatronics Engineering at University of Waterloo
Stackoverflow
1,590reputation
137kreached
10answers
16questions
Github Skills (48)
socket-io10
robotics10
c-language10
unix10
system-programming10
controller10
python10
testing10
gps10
nmea10
c-programming10
microcontroller10
network-programming10
socket10
device-driver10
Programming languages (25)
Github contributions (5)
ros-drivers/pointgrey_camera_driver
Feb 2014 - Oct 2017
ROS driver for Pt. Grey cameras, based on the official FlyCapture2 SDK.
Role in this project:
Software Engineer
Software EngineerContributions:99 commits, 51 PRs, 67 pushes in 3 years 8 months
Contributions summary:Mike primarily focused on adapting the Point Grey camera driver for ROS. They contributed by catkinizing the main package, adding udev rules from the FlyCapture installer, and implementing the download of FlyCap dependencies. Further contributions include setting ROS message image encoding to the bayer format, and adding fixes related to i386 and firewire devices. They also added functionalities like setting parameters for frame rate and made changes to the camera info messages.
ros2greycameraslam-algorithmsc-plus-plus
ros-drivers/rosserial
Jul 2013 - Apr 2021
A ROS client library for small, embedded devices, such as Arduino. See: http://wiki.ros.org/rosserial
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:245 commits, 177 PRs, 218 pushes in 7 years 10 months
Contributions summary:Mike primarily contributed to the development of a socket server within the rosserial project, focusing on the underlying infrastructure for communication with embedded devices. The contributions involved the implementation of network communication protocols and handling of message serialization and deserialization using Boost.Asio. The work also included defining and handling ROS message types for communication with the devices over the network.
roboticsros2client-libraryarduinoembedded-devices
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