Ross Williams
Developer & Teacher at Self-employed
Atlanta, Georgia, United States
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolRoss Williams is a versatile developer and educator with 16 years of experience blending back-end engineering, open-source contributions, and hands-on farm operations. He has shipped robust system-level features for notable projects like pfSense, htop (adding cross-platform ZFS ARC stats), and Network UPS Tools, demonstrating deep familiarity with networking, system telemetry, and device integration. Comfortable across PHP, Perl, Python, and Ruby with multiple DBMSs, he excels at teaching complex technical subjects to both technical and non-technical audiences. His current work balances operating a multi-species, creamery-equipped grass-based farm—where he drives infrastructure and pasture fertility improvements—with freelance development and training. A background in theatre and music informs his practical, human-centered approach to problem solving and documentation. This combination of rural systems management and low-level open-source contributions gives him a rare perspective on resilient, real-world engineering.
16 years of coding experience
HS, HS at The Paideia SchoolBA (partial), Music, Technical Theatre, Literature, BA (partial), Music, Technical Theatre, Literature at New York UniversityBachelor of Arts (BA), Environmental Studies, Bachelor of Arts (BA), Environmental Studies at Warren Wilson College
Spanish
Github Skills (28)
snmp10
openzfs10
system-programming10
freebsd10
snmpd10
configuration-management10
firewall10
linux10
process-management10
c-programming10
c1110
c1710
darwin10
php10
driver10
Programming languages (18)
Github contributions (5)
networkupstools/nut
Mar 2019 - Sep 2020
The Network UPS Tools repository. UPS management protocol Informational RFC 9271 published by IETF at https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc9271 Please star NUT on GitHub, this helps with sponsorships!
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:12 commits, 3 PRs, 3 comments in 1 year 6 months
Contributions summary:Ross primarily focused on enhancing the functionality of the Network UPS Tools (NUT) project. Their contributions involved adding and modifying features within the SNMP-UPS driver, notably improving its ability to handle TimeTicks correctly. Significant changes were also made to the cyberpower-mib driver, including the addition of instant commands, correcting sysOID, and improving status reporting. These commits reveal a focus on expanding device support and improving the reliability of the UPS monitoring and control capabilities.
pduserialusbrepository-toolsrfc
htop-dev/htop
Oct 2020 - Feb 2021
htop - an interactive process viewer
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:2 PRs in 3 months
Contributions summary:Ross primarily contributed to the implementation of ZFS ARC statistics within the `htop` process viewer. Their work involved adding support for reading and displaying ZFS ARC data on FreeBSD, Linux, Darwin (macOS), and Solaris, which required modifying platform-specific code and integrating new data points into the UI. The user also refactored and created common APIs for OpenZFS sysctl access to streamline the process of retrieving OpenZFS statistics. Furthermore, they developed support for ZFS compressed ARC statistics, enhancing the monitoring capabilities of the tool.
htopconsolelinuxbsdviewer
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