Paul Henson
Systems Analyst at California State Polytechnic University-Pomona
San Dimas, California, United States
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolPaul Henson is a seasoned systems analyst and software engineer with 15+ years of hands-on experience spanning embedded systems, kernel development, identity and access management, and enterprise system administration at Cal Poly Pomona. He combines rigorous academic training (MS and BS in Computer Science, magna cum laude) with prolific open-source contributions to foundational projects like OpenZFS and illumos—improving ACL semantics, LDAP membership handling, and core filesystem tooling. Known as a "jack of all trades, master of many," Paul excels at synthesizing disparate systems into cohesive architectures and quickly adopting new technologies to solve thorny problems. He balances long-term institutional work with independent consulting to keep solutions practical and interesting, and his contributions reflect a rare depth in both low-level kernel code and high-level IAM design. Based in San Dimas, California, he brings a pragmatic, detail-oriented approach that yields auditable, reliable systems.
15 years of coding experience
3 years of employment as a software developer
Cal Poly Pomona
Stackoverflow
1reputation
0reached
0answers
0questions
Github Skills (17)
openzfs10
filesystem10
acl10
c1110
c1710
kernel10
access-control-list10
zfs10
sys10
kernel-mode10
freebsd9
unix9
ldap9
linux9
systemd8
Programming languages (11)
Github contributions (5)
illumos/illumos-gate
Sep 2012 - Dec 2014
An open-source Unix operating system
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:8 commits in 2 years 3 months
Contributions summary:Paul primarily contributed to the Illumos operating system kernel by enhancing the LDAP client and adding support for uniqueMember attribute in the LDAP client. Their work included modifying the group membership lookup functionality to accommodate username and DN-based lookups, improving its flexibility. The user also made code changes related to ZFS file system, adding support for the "restricted" aclmode option and integrating the new functionality into the core ZFS component. Additionally, the user added the -m flag to the `df` command.
unixkerneloperating-systemlinuxillumos
openzfs/zfs
Dec 2014 - Dec 2019
OpenZFS on Linux and FreeBSD
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:7 commits, 5 PRs, 80 comments in 5 years
Contributions summary:Paul primarily contributed to the OpenZFS project by modifying and enhancing the ZFS file system code. Their work involved implementing and improving ACL (Access Control List) functionalities, including the "aclmode" and "aclinherit" properties. Furthermore, the user addressed issues related to delete permissions and ensured correct inheritance behavior. They also focused on documentation improvements for specific command options.
openzfstarballlinuxfreebsdsystem-software
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