Phil Oakley
Principal Optical Engineer at Ball Aerospace
Boulder, Colorado, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolPhil Oakley is a Principal Optical Engineer based in Boulder with 13 years in instrument design, integration, calibration and test—primarily for ground and space astronomy. He leads requirements definition, error budgeting and performance modeling for complex optical systems, and has hands-on experience across reflecting/refracting imagers, diffraction-grating spectrometers and multiple detector technologies. His career spans sounding-rocket payloads to space-quality instruments, and he pairs optical design expertise (Zemax, FRED) with mechanical CAD (SolidWorks) and scripting in Python/IDL/MATLAB. At NCAR he was PI on a distributed irradiance monitoring instrument and drove DOORS-based requirements and ICD management; at Ball Aerospace he now focuses on verification planning for multiple flight instruments. An active open-source contributor, he has improved Git GUI usability and Windows build tooling, reflecting a long-standing interest in robust tooling and reproducible builds. Colleagues rely on him for pragmatic trade studies that turn tight science requirements into testable, flight-ready hardware.
13 years of coding experience
21 years of employment as a software developer
BS Astrophysics, BS Astrophysics at University of California, BerkeleyFairport High SchoolPhD Astrophysics, PhD Astrophysics at University of Colorado, Boulder
Italian
Github Skills (14)
git10
batch10
script10
tcl10
batchfile10
build-automation10
documentation10
msvcrt9
shell9
net8
network8
c178
networking8
c118
Programming languages (15)
Github contributions (5)
git-for-windows/git
Feb 2015 - Dec 2021
A fork of Git containing Windows-specific patches.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:18 reviews, 213 commits, 18 PRs in 6 years 11 months
Contributions summary:Phil primarily contributed to the `vcpkg_install` batch file within the Git for Windows repository, addressing issues related to build environment dependencies. Their commits focused on ensuring that the vcpkg installation process correctly handles the absence of Git in the system's environment, and also added comments to the script to address network timeouts and the reliance on proxy connections. Additionally, the user made updates addressing LLP64 compatibility in several files related to the code base.
version-controlwindowsgit-hookslibgit2patches
git/git
Sep 2012 - Jan 2023
Git Source Code Mirror - This is a publish-only repository but pull requests can be turned into patches to the mailing list via GitGitGadget (https://gitgitgadget.github.io/). Please follow Documentation/SubmittingPatches procedure for any of your improvements.
Role in this project:Full-stack Developer
Full-stack DeveloperContributions:93 commits, 6 PRs, 11 comments in 10 years 5 months
Contributions summary:Phil primarily contributed to the Git GUI, addressing issues related to the handling of the recent repository list and improving its functionality. They implemented changes to remove duplicate entries, cope with invalid entries, and ensure the gui correctly handles a long recent repository list. Furthermore, the user made contributions to the Git help system, adding documentation and examples to improve usability. They also implemented MSVC compatibility and made updates to build scripts.
hacklanggit-clientmercurialfollowlibgit2
Find and Hire Top DevelopersWe’ve analyzed the programming source code of over 60 million software developers on GitHub and scored them by 50,000 skills. Sign-up on Prog,AI to search for software developers.