Nicholas Hughes
Principal Software Engineer at hopr
Ilchester, Maryland, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolNicholas Hughes is a Principal Software Engineer and former founder with over a decade of hands-on experience building secure, scalable platforms and leading engineering teams. He blends senior leadership roles—VP of Product Engineering and CEO—with deep DevOps and backend expertise, having contributed to high-profile open-source projects like SaltStack where he focused on TLS, configuration management, and performance/security fixes. Based in Maryland, he has a formal background in cybersecurity and database technologies and a track record across defense, telecom, and cloud-focused firms. Nicholas is equally comfortable shipping low-level infrastructure improvements and shaping product strategy, which he demonstrated while running multiple companies and product orgs. Colleagues describe him as a pragmatic technologist who surfaces security and observability concerns early and turns them into operational improvements.
10 years of coding experience
13 years of employment as a software developer
A.A.S. Database Technologies, A.A.S. Database Technologies at Catonsville Community CollegeB.S. Cybersecurity, B.S. Cybersecurity at University of Maryland Global Campus
Github Skills (9)
configuration-management10
python10
cryptography10
testing9
version-control9
automated-tests8
filesystem8
debian8
networking8
Programming languages (15)
Github contributions (5)
saltstack/salt
Feb 2017 - Jan 2023
Software to automate the management and configuration of infrastructure and applications at scale.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer & DevOps Engineer
Back-end Developer & DevOps EngineerContributions:72 reviews, 310 commits, 149 PRs in 6 years
Contributions summary:Nicholas's contributions primarily focused on enhancing the security and functionality of the SaltStack software. They made modifications to the `tls.py` module, likely related to TLS certificate management, and improved the `file.line` and `file.serialize` states. They also addressed performance issues and security concerns by incorporating specific git, archive, and configuration management logic. Additionally, the user added logging and version control to address an issue in the 'aptpkg' module, implying a DevOps engineering role.
pythonzeromqevent-streaminfrastructure-managementcloud-providers
eitrtechnologies/salt-azure
May 2019 - Dec 2019
Azure-specific modules for Salt, hosted here in order to have a faster way to integrate changes. Use with GitFS, and Salt the Cloud!
Contributions:26 commits, 10 PRs, 16 pushes in 6 months
saltdevopshostedfasterinfrastructure-as-code
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