Samuel Dionne-riel
Open Source Software Developer at Self-employed
Quebec, Quebec, Canada
Summary
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RockstarSamuel Dionne-riel is an open source software developer with 14+ years of professional experience and a deep history in web development and daily Linux use since 2006. He has been a core contributor and coordinator to NixOS since 2017, serving as release manager for NixOS 18.09 and 19.03 and leading initiatives like NixOS on ARM, boot user-story design, and gaming-focused presets. Since 2019 he’s been self-employed, founding Mobile NixOS via an NLNet grant and leading Tow-Boot to simplify early startup and firmware for ARM and RISC-V platforms. His contributions span backend engineering (notably improving error diagnostics in Hydra and enhancing nix-shell testing), frontend work on the NixOS homepage, and platform firmware — a rare full-stack footprint in Linux distribution engineering. Based in Quebec, he combines practical release stewardship with hands-on low-level systems work, and he often focuses on the overlooked early-boot experience that makes upstream hardware usable.
14 years of coding experience
10 years of employment as a software developer
French, English
Github Skills (34)
bootloader10
c-language10
nix10
scripting10
css10
command-line-interface10
build-system10
c1110
perl10
c1710
automation10
script10
sys10
command-line10
sh10
Programming languages (28)
Github contributions (5)
NixOS/nixos-homepage
Mar 2018 - Jan 2022
Sources for nixos.org
Role in this project:
Front-end Developer
Front-end DeveloperContributions:33 reviews, 326 commits, 71 PRs in 3 years 11 months
Contributions summary:Samuel primarily contributed to the front-end design and layout of the website. They focused on enhancing the user interface by implementing CSS changes, including centering elements, fixing indents, and improving the brand's appearance. Furthermore, the user made changes to the structure of the landing page to be more project agnostic, refactoring its CSS and HTML structure to enhance the user experience. They also made enhancements to the packages explorer interface.
nixossourcesnix
NixOS/hydra
Dec 2018 - Mar 2021
Hydra, the Nix-based continuous build system
Role in this project:Backend Developer
Backend DeveloperContributions:19 reviews, 14 commits, 7 PRs in 2 years 4 months
Contributions summary:Samuel primarily contributed to the backend functionality of the Hydra build system. They implemented features to handle and display errors more effectively, including lazy loading of error messages. They also made improvements to the error handling in the evaluator jobs, ensuring errors are logged to STDERR and transmitted in the JSON output, which is crucial for debugging. Furthermore, they enhanced the handling of aggregate jobs by identifying and transmitting original Nix errors, thus improving the diagnostic capabilities.
nixoscontinuoushydrabuild-system
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