Ross Mcfarland
Principal Infrastructure Engineer SRE at GitHub
Portland, Oregon, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolRoss Mcfarland is a Principal Infrastructure Engineer and SRE in Portland with 18 years of experience designing resilient, cost-efficient systems for large-scale web platforms. At GitHub he led observability and DNS IaC initiatives—creating octoDNS and overhauling metrics, backups, and network device tooling—delivering measurable cost savings and clearer operational visibility. He’s a pragmatic polyglot engineer comfortable across backend, frontend and DevOps stacks, with notable open-source contributions to Terraform, Consul, and the popular requests-futures library that improve reliability and developer ergonomics. Ross combines deep systems-level expertise (from embedded C++ to cloud-native architectures) with a knack for making complex infrastructure accessible to non-technical teams through tooling and documentation. Colleagues rely on him for infrastructure clarity, training, and practical leadership during large migrations and platform improvements.
18 years of coding experience
14 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelors of Science, Computer Science, Bachelors of Science, Computer Science at University of Kentucky, College of Engineering
Swedish, English
Github Skills (34)
api-rest10
javascript10
cloud-manager10
python10
testing10
http10
ui-design10
terraform10
uid10
terraformer10
emberjs10
consul10
go10
manage10
dns10
Programming languages (19)
Github contributions (5)
ross/requests-futures
Mar 2013 - Dec 2022
Asynchronous Python HTTP Requests for Humans using Futures
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:20 reviews, 79 commits, 84 PRs in 9 years 10 months
Contributions summary:Ross primarily contributed to the development and maintenance of the `requests-futures` library. Their work focused on enhancing the project's documentation, including adding code examples and correcting errors. They also made critical updates to the build process, fixing the setup configuration and bumping the version number. Additionally, the user added tests to ensure the library functions correctly, especially focusing on redirect handling and context management.
http-requestspythonasynchronousasyncioaiohttp
octodns/octodns
Mar 2017 - Jan 2023
Tools for managing DNS across multiple providers
Role in this project:Backend Developer
Backend DeveloperContributions:425 reviews, 1609 commits, 1076 PRs in 5 years 11 months
Contributions summary:Ross primarily focused on modifying core logic in the octodns/octodns repository. Contributions centered around code refactoring and improvements to existing functionalities, as evidenced by changes related to filtering mechanisms, record handling, and domain management. The user made changes in several key files across the project, involving testing and overall code quality. The code changes are related to improving DNS management across multiple providers, as mentioned in the repo description.
dnsprovidersdns-recordinfrastructure-as-codeworkflow
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