Steven Danna
Member Of Technical Staff at Cockroach Labs
United Kingdom
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolSteven Danna is a Member of Technical Staff at Cockroach Labs with 14 years of experience building and hardening distributed systems, developer tooling, and packaging infrastructure. He pairs deep backend and database expertise—contributions to CockroachDB and the Pebble key-value store around replication, free-space accounting, and external file handling—with strong DevOps craftsmanship from long standing work in Chef, Habitat, and Omnibus packaging. Steven’s work blends systems-level performance fixes and test-driven reliability improvements, and he has repeatedly improved build automation, packaging plans, and documentation across high-profile open-source projects. Comfortable moving between code, automation, and ops, he has a track record of reducing complexity in production workflows while adding observability and robustness. An unusual combination of philosophy, math-economics and municipal finance graduate studies informs his pragmatic, systems-thinking approach to engineering trade-offs.
14 years of coding experience
11 years of employment as a software developer
MPA, Municipal Finance, MPA, Municipal Finance at University of WashingtonBA, Philosophy, BA, Philosophy at University of Pittsburgh
Github Skills (66)
ec10
dependency-management10
gitlab-omnibus10
package-management10
testing10
command-line-interface10
databases10
bash10
file-operations10
ruby10
chef-client10
automation10
build-automation10
systemd10
software-packaging10
Programming languages (11)
Github contributions (5)
chef/omnibus-software
Mar 2015 - Sep 2020
Open Source Software for use in Omnibus built packages
Role in this project:
DevOps Engineer
DevOps EngineerContributions:105 commits, 111 PRs, 103 pushes in 5 years 7 months
Contributions summary:Steven primarily contributes to the configuration and management of the `omnibus-software` repository, which is used to build software packages. Their work includes updating software versions, patching dependencies like OpenSSL and Redis, and modifying build processes. They also added and improved tooling, introducing tasks like listing, fetching, and fetching_all to streamline software management and improve the HTTPS sources.
omnibusopen-source-software
habitat-sh/core-plans
Jun 2016 - Dec 2020
Core Habitat Plan definitions
Role in this project:DevOps Engineer & Package Maintainer
DevOps Engineer & Package MaintainerContributions:11 reviews, 179 commits, 177 PRs in 4 years 6 months
Contributions summary:Steven primarily contributed to the maintenance and expansion of core Habitat plan definitions within the repository. Their work involved creating new plans for software packages like Tor, libtiff, and tmux, alongside updating existing ones such as curl and openssl. The user also focused on improving build processes, including incorporating test functions and addressing dependencies, while also making improvements to the repository's build script, and ensuring that packages built in the repository are up-to-date and functional.
planhabitatpackage-managerdefinitionspackages
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