Sean Mcdonald
Senior Software Engineer at Puppet
Chicago, Illinois, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolSean Mcdonald is a Senior Software Engineer with 11 years of experience designing and shipping scalable configuration management and release tooling at Puppet in Chicago. He blends product-focused feature development for Puppet Enterprise with deep platform and automation expertise, having improved build, test and install workflows across Windows, AIX, and SLES platforms. A hands-on contributor to notable open-source projects like Bolt, he’s enhanced local transports, thread-safe file uploads, and CI/test reliability—work that quietly reduces friction for operators at scale. Sean mentors junior engineers and collaborates cross-functionally on long-term product design, bringing both release-engineering rigor and practical DevOps instincts to complex distributed systems.
11 years of coding experience
5 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor of Science (B.S.), Computer Science, Bachelor of Science (B.S.), Computer Science at Oregon State University
Github Skills (31)
puppeteer10
puppet10
testing10
windows10
configuration-management10
bolt10
cicd10
ruby10
python-modules10
automation10
powershell10
automations10
orchestration10
orchestra10
devops10
Programming languages (10)
Github contributions (5)
puppetlabs/puppetlabs-puppet_agent
Jun 2017 - May 2019
Module for managing Puppet-Agent
Role in this project:
DevOps Engineer
DevOps EngineerContributions:1 review, 47 commits, 32 PRs in 1 year 11 months
Contributions summary:Sean primarily contributed to the module's infrastructure and automation aspects. They added support for new operating system versions (SLES 15), updated Windows installation scripts to use PowerShell, and improved service management during upgrades. Furthermore, they implemented error reporting for background processes, ensuring the module handles failures gracefully. These contributions focus on improving the module's reliability, compatibility, and deployment processes.
puppet-agentsupportedagentpuppet
puppetlabs/bolt
Apr 2018 - Aug 2022
Bolt is an open source orchestration tool that automates the manual work it takes to maintain your infrastructure on an as-needed basis or as part of a greater orchestration workflow. It can be installed on your local workstation and connects directly to remote nodes with SSH or WinRM, so you are not required to install any agent software.
Role in this project:DevOps Engineer & Automation Engineer
DevOps Engineer & Automation EngineerContributions:50 reviews, 33 commits, 49 PRs in 4 years 4 months
Contributions summary:Sean primarily contributed to improving the Bolt open-source orchestration tool by enhancing its testing and build processes. They focused on refining the local transport functionality within the tool by addressing issues related to PowerShell profiles and ensuring proper execution. Additionally, the user made improvements to the build, test and release process for bolt server including test fixtures, ensuring reliable and consistent test outcomes. Further contributions included adjustments to the file upload process within bolt-server to ensure functionality with single files and thread safety.
workstationautomatessshbasistakes
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