Robert Collins
Distinguished Architect at Cognite
Oslo, Norway
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolRobert Collins is a Distinguished Architect based in Oslo with 25 years of experience designing and shipping large-scale cloud and developer-facing systems. He blends deep software architecture and SRE practice with hands-on implementation in Python, Go and Rust, and currently contributes to Cognite Data Fusion while serving on the rustup working group and as a PSF Fellow. His open-source track record spans performance-critical contributions to rustup and tar-rs, long-standing improvements to pip and CPython testing, and operational automation across OpenStack projects. Robert is fluent in bridging developer experience, testing and deployment concerns—refactoring installers and CI pipelines to reduce toil and improve correctness, including fixing TOCTOU bugs and optimizing tar extraction on Windows. He brings rare cross-domain experience from kernel-level tooling up to cloud-native SRE architectures, and a history of leading cultural as well as technical change at organisations like VMware and Canonical. He pairs formal training in mathematics and computer science with a pragmatic, evidence-driven approach to system design and operability.
25 years of coding experience
22 years of employment as a software developer
Mathematics, Computer Science, Mathematics, Computer Science at University of Otago
English
Github Skills (47)
unit-testing10
laravel-nova10
filesystem10
bare-metal10
python10
testing10
packaging10
bash10
build-system10
template-engine10
openstack-nova10
development-tools10
file-operations10
cicd10
automation10
Programming languages (29)
Github contributions (5)
rust-lang/rustup
Apr 2019 - Jan 2023
The Rust toolchain installer
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:304 reviews, 197 commits, 275 PRs in 3 years 10 months
Contributions summary:Robert's contributions focused on improving the performance of the Rust toolchain installer. They implemented optimizations to reduce the amount of copying during the installation process, leading to significant speed improvements. The user also refactored and improved the handling of file permissions and tarball extraction. Their work primarily involved modifications to the core installation logic within the `rustup` codebase.
rusttoolchainrustlang
openstack/requirements
Aug 2013 - Mar 2016
Global requirements for OpenStack. Mirror of code maintained at opendev.org.
Role in this project:DevOps Engineer & Automation Engineer
DevOps Engineer & Automation EngineerContributions:84 commits in 2 years 7 months
Contributions summary:Robert's primary focus within the OpenStack requirements repository was to improve the build and test infrastructure. Their work involved modifying and enhancing the integration testing scripts, including adding support for testing with specific versions of pip. They introduced automation by implementing features for generating upper-constraints.txt files and integrated these new features into the test pipeline to ensure deterministic builds. Moreover, the user updated and refactored existing test scripts to improve their efficiency and readability.
openstack
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