Troy Dawson
Principle Software Engineer - CentOS Stream Team Lead at Casual Penguins
Spokane Valley, Washington, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolTroy Dawson is a Principal Software Engineer and team lead at Red Hat with 13+ years of experience building and packaging large-scale Linux and cloud platforms, currently leading the CentOS Stream team and work to convert Fedora into Emerging RHEL releases. He has deep expertise across OpenShift packaging, installation, and automation—demonstrated by cross-architecture build and CI improvements he contributed to the widely used OpenShift origin and ansible projects. Troy’s background spans distribution engineering at Fermilab (Scientific/Fermi Linux) through enterprise productization at Red Hat, giving him rare end-to-end fluency from accelerator operations to container platforms. He combines systems-level security and errata management with hands-on DevOps scripting to make complex builds reproducible across aarch64, ppc64le and s390x. An entrepreneur and creative designer as founder of Casual Penguins, he pairs technical leadership with product and visual sensibility. Based in Spokane Valley, WA, he brings a blend of legacy distro stewardship and modern cloud-native practice to open source ecosystems.
13 years of coding experience
24 years of employment as a software developer
BS, Physics, BS, Physics at Utah State UniversityMS, Computer Science, MS, Computer Science at Illinois Institute of Technology
Github Skills (29)
kubernetes10
docker10
continuous-integration10
scripting10
continuous-delivery10
dockers10
cicd10
ruby10
automation10
script10
openshift10
kubernetes-pods10
ansible10
sh10
ansible-galaxy10
Programming languages (12)
Github contributions (5)
openshift/origin
Feb 2015 - Jun 2017
Conformance test suite for OpenShift
Role in this project:
DevOps Engineer
DevOps EngineerContributions:719 commits, 45 PRs, 4 pushes in 2 years 4 months
Contributions summary:Troy's contributions focused on integrating build automation and cross-platform compatibility within the OpenShift origin repository. They modified build scripts and configurations, specifically involving the `.tito` build system and `hack` scripts, to ensure the project could successfully build on various architectures and platforms, including aarch64, ppc64le, and s390x. The user also updated build-related files to accommodate new build locations and incorporate version information into the build process. These changes indicate a strong focus on automating the build process and enhancing platform support.
containerscontinuous-deploymentcaaspaascontinuous-testing
openshift/origin-server
Sep 2012 - May 2015
OpenShift 2 (deprecated)
Role in this project:Backend Developer
Backend DeveloperContributions:464 commits, 3 pushes, 3 tags in 2 years 8 months
Contributions summary:Troy contributed to the `openshift/origin-server` repository, which is deprecated, suggesting their work focused on the server-side functionality of OpenShift 2. Their commits show modifications to the `stickshift-node` and `application.rb` files, indicating involvement in the core infrastructure and application management aspects of the platform. The code changes include modifications to user account management, environment variable handling, and potentially the underlying Git repository setup for applications. Additionally, they worked on the phpMyAdmin configuration.
kubernetesopenshift
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