Julian Foad—Open Source Developer—CV

Special interests in
Matrix, Git, Svn,
degoogled Android, self-hosting

my Works & Contributions

email julian@foad.me.uk
[matrix] @julian:foad.me.uk
my LinkedIn profile
Nottingham, UK


Current Interests and Skills

My current interests and skills from the ​last few years are in the areas of Matrix, Android, and Self-hosting ecosystems, with emphasis on software solutions that enable freedoms such as freedom of choice, privacy and self-agency.

Please see my wrily.foad.me.uk/matrix-android-self-hosting-skills page.


Experience

Self-Employed (contractor)

Software development, maintenance, support, IT, 2016 – Present

Including contracts with: WANdisco, Open Tech Strategies.


link to Assembla.com

 

Assembla

Subversion Senior Software Engineer, – 2020

SAAS integration with git and svn: Ruby middle layer -> Protobufs/NATS/GRPC -> C++ back-end calling libgit2 and libsvn.

Open-source development of features in Subversion.

Leading changes in the FOSS community: switching Subversion to a time-based and faster release schedule; shifting focus to maintenance.

FOSS release management: Subversion releases 1.10.0 through 1.13.0.

Private experiments in removing performance bottlenecks in svn.


link to Apache Subversion

 

Apache Subversion

Full Committer, – Present


link to The Apache Software Foundation

 

The Apache Software Foundation

Member, – Present


link to WANdisco.com

 

WANdisco, Inc.

Senior Subversion Committer,

Working at all times within the open-source community in collaboration with employees of other companies and many volunteers, my remit was to develop Apache Subversion in whatever direction I thought best.

My first main focus was on improving Subversion’s merge tracking: I developed the “automatic” or “symmetric” merging mode which helped to unify the previous “sync” and “reintegrate” merging modes. This was released in Subversion v1.8 (https://subversion.apache.org/docs/release-notes/1.8.html#auto-reintegrate).

My second main focus was researching how to provide rename (or move) tracking in Subversion.

I also assisted the customer support team on request with difficult issues such as repairing corrupted repositories, and helped them interface with the open-source community such as advising how best to involve the community on customer-requested features and bug fixes.


link to Collab.Net

 

CollabNet, Inc.

Software Engineer,

Subversion open-source developer. In a similar role to that at WANdisco, I worked mostly on making Subversion detect conflicting tree changes (such as when one user edits a file and another user deletes or moves the same file). The result of this work was released in Subversion v1.6 (https://subversion.apache.org/docs/release-notes/1.6.html#tree-conflicts) and documented in The Subversion Book (https://svnbook.red-bean.com/en/1.6/svn.tour.treeconflicts.html).


link to Sepura.com

 

Sepura, plc.

Senior Software Engineer,

Migration of version control system from CVS-based to Perforce. Embedded software in two-way radios.


logo of Satchwell

 

Satchwell Control Systems, Ltd.

Principal Software Engineer,

Embedded networking software in the Building Management System.

Building gateways to third-party systems such as fire alarm control panels, door card access controllers, lighting, heating, and air conditioning controllers for a Building Management system.

Developing a network transport layer based on UDP/IP, including multicast, to replace a proprietary one.


 

Hobby Electronics

1980s – 1990s

Making peripheral interfaces for my Z80-based home computers: SCSI to connect a hard disk, PCM sound, Real-Time Clock, RS232 serial. Designing, building, writing drivers, writing applications.


Education

link to University of Southampton

University of Southampton

MEng (with merit), Information Engineering,