Richard Yao
Principal Systems Engineer at Scandent
Village of Farmingdale, New York, United States
Summary
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Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolRichard Yao is a Principal Systems Engineer with 14 years of experience building and hardening low-level storage and OS software, currently leading systems work at Scandent from his base in Farmingdale, NY. He brings deep kernel- and filesystem-level expertise demonstrated by significant contributions to OpenZFS, illumos, and dtrace4linux—work that includes ashift=13 SSD support, ZFS locking fixes, and eliminating use-after-free bugs. Richard excels at production-focused refactors and compatibility fixes, having removed legacy dependencies and stabilized eudev and kernel integrations. His background in computer science and applied mathematics underpins a methodical approach to performance tuning and cross-platform interoperability. Notably, he pairs hands-on defect remediation with tool improvements (zdb enhancements and test-suite work), showing a preference for durable, testable system fixes over quick patches.
14 years of coding experience
3 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor of Science (B.S.), Computer Science; Applied Mathematics and Statistics, Bachelor of Science (B.S.), Computer Science; Applied Mathematics and Statistics at Stony Brook University
Github Skills (28)
compatible10
filesystem10
unix10
system-programming10
module-loader10
backward-compatibility10
c1110
linux-kernel10
c1710
compatibility10
kernel10
system10
lazy-loading10
disk10
performance-optimization10
Programming languages (19)
Github contributions (5)
openzfs/zfs
Jul 2011 - Jan 2023
OpenZFS on Linux and FreeBSD
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:536 reviews, 388 commits, 246 PRs in 11 years 8 months
Contributions summary:Richard focused on open-source file system development and system administration. Their primary contributions involved enhancing the ZFS filesystem's functionality, specifically implementing support for ashift=13 (8KB SSD block sizes) and improving the detection of distributions. They were also responsible for improving error handling and optimizing the codebase, including work related to disk performance and a bug fix that prevented performance issues. These changes indicate experience with low-level system software and a strong understanding of file system internals.
openzfstarballlinuxfreebsdsystem-software
eudev-project/eudev
Nov 2012 - Aug 2015
Repository for eudev development
Role in this project:Backend Developer
Backend DeveloperContributions:25 commits, 1 PR, 3 pushes in 2 years 9 months
Contributions summary:Richard primarily focused on improving the eudev project, with a focus on core system functionalities. They made significant changes to the codebase, eliminating dependencies on `kmod` and `blkid-builtin`, and refactoring the code to utilize `modprobe` instead. They also addressed build failures, added preprocessor directives, corrected file permissions, and updated the code to use `dup2` over `dup3`. These changes suggest a focus on maintaining and improving the underlying system utilities.
systemdlinuxmintxenlinux-distributionjavascript
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