Samuel Cochran
Melbourne, Victoria, Australia
Summary
🤩
RockstarSamuel Cochran is a solutions-focused technologist with 18 years' experience building and securing web platforms, particularly in the Ruby/Rails ecosystem. Based in Melbourne, he blends backend engineering, DevOps and automation—contributing to high-profile open-source projects like RubyGems, Devise and Rails while serving as a founding engineer at Buildkite. His work spans CI/CD and release automation (notably improving Buildkite Agent builds across ARM and packaging targets), production security hardening for rubygems.org, and performance-minded ActiveRecord improvements. Comfortable across SQL, search (Elasticsearch), mail protocols and background processing, he favors open technologies and pragmatic, test-driven changes. He also writes clear technical docs and modernizes CI pipelines, demonstrating both developer ergonomics and operational rigor. Colleagues rely on him to turn thorny integration problems into reliable, automated workflows.
18 years of coding experience
Stackoverflow
6,813reputation
424kreached
54answers
1question
activerecord
top-1%
collections
top-1%
ruby-on-rails
top-1%
Github Skills (75)
postgresql10
package-management10
testing10
authentication10
bash10
smtps10
ruby10
security10
package-manager-tool10
automation10
ci-cd-pipeline10
activerecord10
ruby-on-rails10
markdown10
rubygems10
Programming languages (21)
Github contributions (5)
sj26/mailcatcher
Oct 2010 - Jul 2022
Catches mail and serves it through a dream.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:22 releases, 25 reviews, 473 commits in 11 years 10 months
Contributions summary:Samuel primarily worked on the back-end functionality of the mailcatcher project. Their contributions involved adding and modifying features related to the handling and display of email messages. This includes implementing command-line options, improving message reception, splitting the codebase into modules, and implementing methods to support downloading emails. Furthermore, the user refactored option parsing and running of the application.
mailsmtprubygemssinatrarails
buildkite/agent
May 2014 - Nov 2022
The Buildkite Agent is an open-source toolkit written in Go for securely running build jobs on any device or network
Role in this project:DevOps Engineer & Automation Engineer
DevOps Engineer & Automation EngineerContributions:2 releases, 93 reviews, 297 commits in 8 years 7 months
Contributions summary:Samuel primarily contributed to the Buildkite Agent's build and release processes. Their commits focused on enhancing the CI/CD pipeline by implementing static linking, adding support for new architectures (armhf, arm64), and refining package creation scripts for Debian and RPM distributions. Furthermore, the user improved the automation of the release process by updating Homebrew formulas and GitHub release scripts. These changes streamlined the build and distribution of the agent across multiple platforms.
continuous-deploymentgolangbuild-jobsjobsenvironments
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