Simon Mcvittie
Developer at Debian
Greater Brighton and Hove Area United Kingdom
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolSimon Mcvittie is a seasoned developer with 19 years of experience contributing to critical open-source infrastructure and commercial projects from the Debian project to Collabora. He specializes in backend systems, build and release engineering, and DevOps—improving reproducible builds, cross-compilation, and sandboxing across high-profile projects like Meson, PipeWire, Flatpak, and the Steam Runtime. As a D-Bus maintainer and Debian developer, he combines deep Linux systems knowledge with practical fixes for container and Flatpak environments (notably robust joystick handling and udev-less hotplug detection). His work emphasizes test automation, portability and security, with repeated contributions that tighten CI, expand regression tests, and fix subtle platform bugs. Cambridge-trained in mathematics, he brings a rigorous, low-level problem-solving approach that shows up in optimizations to GNOME/GTK internals and careful build-system hygiene. Notably, he balances system architecture thinking with hands-on patch-level work—refactoring, adding unit tests and improving developer tooling across diverse ecosystems.
19 years of coding experience
Master’s Degree, Mathematics, Master’s Degree, Mathematics at University of Cambridge
Github Skills (113)
deco10
python10
sdl10
testing10
test-framework10
bash10
c1110
ruby10
glib10
c1710
automation10
gtk10
automation-testing10
build-automation10
activerecord10
Programming languages (24)
Github contributions (5)
containers/bubblewrap
Jun 2016 - Dec 2022
Low-level unprivileged sandboxing tool used by Flatpak and similar projects
Role in this project:
Backend & DevOps Engineer
Backend & DevOps EngineerContributions:8 releases, 154 reviews, 170 commits in 6 years 7 months
Contributions summary:Simon primarily contributed to improving the testing framework of the bubblewrap tool. They modified the test scripts to support installed binaries, handle fuse mounts correctly, and produce more detailed TAP output. The user also addressed security vulnerabilities by implementing a fix related to CVE-2017-5226. Additionally, the user made changes to improve the robustness and portability of the test suite, including adding support for Python 3 and CI using GitHub workflows.
sandboxingunprivilegedseccomplinuxsandbox
ValveSoftware/steam-runtime
Sep 2018 - Sep 2022
A runtime environment for Steam applications
Role in this project:DevOps Engineer & Build & Release Engineer
DevOps Engineer & Build & Release EngineerContributions:3 reviews, 306 commits, 78 PRs in 4 years 1 month
Contributions summary:Simon's contributions primarily focused on building and automating the Steam Runtime environment. Their work includes scripting the build process, creating manifest files to track installed packages, setting up chroot environments, and automating the creation of tarballs. The user also implemented a system to download and manage dependencies, along with adding the ability to create and manage Debian-based system images. Furthermore, the user integrated and tested tools for code style and type checking.
steamsteamworksruntimeruntime-environment
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