Phil Pennock
Software Engineer at Synadia
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States
Summary
🤩
RockstarPhil Pennock is a seasoned Site Reliability Engineer and systems architect with 19 years building and hardening cloud and Unix infrastructure across startups and large tech firms, including founding-team work at Apcera and SRE roles at Google and Twitter. He combines a "get stuff done" mindset with pragmatic engineering discipline to reduce technical debt, design resilient systems, and document operational practices so teams can scale safely. An active open-source contributor, Phil has improved core projects like the high-performance NATS server and CLI, strengthened Exim mail security, and extended DNSControl provider support—work that reflects deep networking, mail, and protocol expertise. He mentors engineers, founded and merged a local Go meetup into Pittsburgh’s Code & Supply, and has 11 years of proven remote-work experience. Practical and hands-on, he prefers the right team fit over company size and is open to relocation.
19 years of coding experience
English, Dutch
Stackoverflow
802reputation
123kreached
18answers
0questions
Github Skills (57)
kubernetes10
nat10
sendmail10
send-email10
it-security10
net10
ip10
command-line-interface10
cluster-computing10
distributed-systems10
smtp10
c1110
smtps10
networking10
message-queue10
Programming languages (22)
Github contributions (5)
StackExchange/dnscontrol
Apr 2017 - Mar 2022
Infrastructure as code for DNS!
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer & DevOps Engineer
Back-end Developer & DevOps EngineerContributions:7 reviews, 17 commits, 13 PRs in 5 years
Contributions summary:Phil primarily contributed to enhancing the functionality of the DNSControl project, focusing on DNS provider integrations and features. They implemented support for various DNS record types such as SSHFP, TXT multi, NAPTR, and DS records. Furthermore, they worked on integrating with specific DNS providers like DNSimple, BIND, and Gandi, adding features such as AutoDNSSEC support and making corrections to existing provider implementations. Their work also extended to infrastructure and documentation, including improvements to provider capabilities and the support matrix.
dnscontroldnsdslproviderssynchronize
nats-io/nats-server
Feb 2020 - Sep 2022
High-Performance server for NATS.io, the cloud and edge native messaging system.
Role in this project:Back-end Developer & DevOps Engineer
Back-end Developer & DevOps EngineerContributions:93 reviews, 34 commits, 42 PRs in 2 years 7 months
Contributions summary:Phil primarily focused on enhancing the NATS server's core functionality, including version bumping and the implementation of TCP keepalive settings. They refactored the networking and server components to disable keepalives for optimal performance and IoT deployment scenarios. Furthermore, the user made changes to improve FreeBSD compatibility and optimize the build process by removing the need for CGO in certain architectures. They also introduced logging and secret redaction improvements.
messaging-systemnats-ionative-messagingnatsmessage-bus
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