Tom Fifield
Chief Operating Officer
Melbourne, Victoria, Australia
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolTom Fifield is a seasoned technology executive and distributed systems expert with 15+ years building large-scale cloud infrastructure and open source communities, currently serving as COO of Aptira in Melbourne. He combines hands-on engineering (notably documentation and technical contributions to flagship OpenStack projects like Cinder and Horizon) with strategic leadership—having launched national programs in Taiwan and led major research-cloud builds in Australia. Comfortable navigating cross-cultural and distributed teams, he has a proven track record turning complex government and research requirements into operational platforms and policy. An active contributor to IoT firmware (Meshtastic GPS improvements) and long-time OpenStack advocate, he brings rare fluency across operations, developer experience, and international stakeholder management.
15 years of coding experience
12 years of employment as a software developer
The University of Melbourne
English, Chinese
Github Skills (27)
c-language10
restructuredtext10
sphinx10
django10
gps10
firmware10
rs10
openstack10
service-design10
lora10
service-provider10
cprogramming-language10
sphinxsearch10
documentation10
python9
Programming languages (16)
Github contributions (5)
openstack/openstack-manuals
Apr 2012 - Oct 2016
OpenStack Manuals. Mirror of code maintained at opendev.org.
Role in this project:
Technical Writer
Technical WriterContributions:421 commits in 4 years 6 months
Contributions summary:Tom primarily contributed to the OpenStack manuals repository by updating and improving documentation. Their commits focused on standardizing terminology ("Administration"), adding links to developer documentation, preparing documentation for the Grizzly release (removing old references), and marking release status. Additionally, they fixed a broken PDF link in the Ops Guide and corrected a typo in the Portuguese translation.
manualsopendevopenstack
meshtastic/firmware
Apr 2024 - Mar 2025
Meshtastic device firmware
Role in this project:Embedded Systems Engineer / IoT Developer
Embedded Systems Engineer / IoT DeveloperContributions:359 reviews, 309 PRs, 238 pushes in 11 months
Contributions summary:Tom primarily contributed to the Meshtastic firmware by implementing and refining GPS functionality. Their contributions include adding support for new GPS modules, such as the AG3335, AG3352, and ATGM332D series, as well as fixing issues with existing ones like the U-Blox family. They also addressed bugs related to power management and display interactions, and optimized the baud rate probing sequence for improved GPS detection reliability.
rp2040nrf52meshfirmwareoff-grid
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