Simon Guest
New Zealand
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolSimon Guest is a veteran Contract Software and DevOps Engineer in New Zealand with 15 years of experience building and modernising large-scale, production Linux systems and platforms. He combines a rigorous mathematical education from Cambridge with deep practical skills across Python, Go, C/C++, Rust and Clojure, and has repeatedly delivered migration and deployment automation for HPC, cloud and container environments (OpenStack, Terraform, Podman, Fedora CoreOS, Rocky Linux). As a founder and technical lead he has designed web-scale systems and led embedded and platform transitions, while at AgResearch he architected and executed a petabyte-scale ZFS migration moving ~200M files with custom Python tooling. He’s an active open-source maintainer with impactful contributions to the rkt container runtime’s stage1_fly component, showing a knack for improving low-level process and environment handling. Comfortable across infrastructure, backend and security concerns, Simon blends pragmatic engineering with formal rigor and a track record of turning complex, legacy estates into modern, automated platforms.
15 years of coding experience
11 years of employment as a software developer
Post Graduate Diploma, Computer Science, Post Graduate Diploma, Computer Science at University of Cambridge
Stackoverflow
321reputation
191kreached
2answers
0questions
Github Skills (15)
occi10
container10
go10
rkt10
system-design8
dockers7
docker7
sh6
scripting6
script6
linux6
shell6
md5sum6
api-design6
haskell6
Programming languages (24)
Github contributions (5)
rkt/rkt
Jun 2017 - Aug 2017
[Project ended] rkt is a pod-native container engine for Linux. It is composable, secure, and built on standards.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer & DevOps Engineer
Back-end Developer & DevOps EngineerContributions:8 commits, 4 PRs, 62 comments in 1 month
Contributions summary:Simon primarily focused on modifying and improving the `stage1_fly` component of the `rkt` project, particularly related to process credentials and environment handling. They implemented features to preserve the environment between the `run` and `enter` phases, ensuring proper application execution. Additionally, the user refactored and optimized the existing code, addressing bugs and improving overall code quality, while making minor changes related to RPM/deb package upgrades.
linuxrktgocontainersoci
tesujimath/limabean
Apr 2025 - May 2026
A new implementation of Beancount using Rust and Clojure and the Lima parser
Contributions:51 PRs, 571 pushes, 160 branches in 1 year 1 month
beancountclojureparserrust
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