Tristan Ross
Software Engineer at Determinate Systems, Inc.
Oceanside, California, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolTristan Ross is a low-level systems engineer and founder with a decade of hands-on experience building OS-level tooling, compilers, and reproducible build systems. As Founder & CEO of Midstall and a software engineer at Determinate Systems, he bridges embedded Nix, Nixpkgs, and security work with practical contributions to Zig and LLVM, including UEFI and libc integration. He has a strong DevOps background—managing DNS/subdomain configurations for the js.org community—and experience packaging Postgres plugins for Supabase. Based in Oceanside, California, Tristan pairs formal study in computer science with prolific open-source impact as a Nixpkgs & LLVM committer. Outside of code he’s interested in space, photography, and Japanese VTuber culture, a detail that reflects a curiosity-driven approach to problem solving.
9 years of coding experience
1 year of employment as a software developer
High School Diploma, Computer Science, High School Diploma, Computer Science at Sherwood High SchoolAssociate's degree, Computer and Information Sciences, General, Associate's degree, Computer and Information Sciences, General at Portland Community College
Japanese, English
Stackoverflow
11reputation
180reached
2answers
2questions
Github Skills (30)
uefi10
libc10
c-language10
domain-name10
llvm10
build-system10
lang10
compiler-compiler10
zig10
dns10
sys10
compiler10
cprogramming-language10
subdomain10
operating-system10
Programming languages (34)
Github contributions (5)
llvm/llvm-project
Feb 2024 - Apr 2025
The LLVM Project is a collection of modular and reusable compiler and toolchain technologies.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:141 reviews, 39 PRs, 5 pushes in 1 year 1 month
Contributions summary:Tristan primarily contributed to the LLVM libc project, making changes related to the underlying system libraries, including unistd, and compiler-rt. Their work involved adding and modifying headers, especially unistd_overlay.h, to ensure compatibility within the project. The user also integrated changes to UEFI headers, preparing the project for UEFI support. Furthermore, the user addressed issues within the build system, fixing build failures and improving compatibility.
compilerstechnologiesclangsubmittoolchain
ziglang/zig
Feb 2020 - Apr 2025
General-purpose programming language and toolchain for maintaining robust, optimal, and reusable software.
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:94 reviews, 31 PRs, 312 comments in 5 years 2 months
Contributions summary:Tristan primarily focused on enhancing the Zig programming language's standard library by adding features and improving existing functionalities. Their work included exposing methods and structs for parsing, adding UEFI (Unified Extensible Firmware Interface) support for time manipulation, and refining the handling of code models in build steps. They also contributed to core functionalities like byte swapping and improved the handling of endianness in the standard library's I/O operations. These changes demonstrate a strong understanding of low-level system programming and language design.
purposecompilertoolchainzigprogramming-language
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