About Brendan
Hello! 👋
I'm a senior software engineer with over 6 years of experience in the industry. I'm mostly specialised on the backend side of the spectrum, having spent over 4 years as a core contributor to server-side projects around the Matrix open standard, but I've also worked a bit with frontend development and devops.
Why work with me?
- I'm a fast learner: I can adapt very quickly to new projects and frameworks, even outside of the languages and platforms I'm not already familiar with.
- I get things done: I have a track record of seeing projects all the way to their completion, and possibly even further. My experience working with open standards has enabled me to own projects from writing the specification all the way to interacting with the ops team to get the implementation deployed in production.
- I'm meticulous: When I'm tasked with a new project, I don't just read the requirements and implement them; I try to understand how the project fits within the company's product, and engage with stakeholders to ensure the project can progress in the best conditions possible, and to address any issue or blocker as soon as possible.
- I communicate: I believe communication is key in a project. I have experience of interacting with internal stakeholders, whether they have a technical background or not, and with customer. I know how to adapt to my audience and communicate effectively on the context and progress of a project to ensure a smooth delivery.
English
Native or bilingual
French
Native or bilingual
Remote only
Primarily works remotely
Experience
- ElementSenior Software EngineerDIGITAL AND ITNovember 2018 - December 2022 (4 years and 1 month)London, United KingdomI was part of Element’s backend team, which maintains various server-side projects on behalf of the Matrix.org Foundation. Projects I have contributed to during this time include:
- Implementing core features around account management in Dendrite, the next generation Matrix homeserver implementation written in Go. This has helped in reducing the barrier for entry for beta testers and improving development pace.
- Maintaining Synapse, the main Matrix server implementation in the Matrix ecosystem, written in Python with Twisted. This includes designing, specifying and implementing new features, fixing bugs impacting both high-profile customers and regular users, creating and communicating on new releases, and interacting with the community.
- Planning and leading a multi-month refactoring project for the Matrix deployment of a major government customer. This helped in reducing the resources needed to maintain this deployment, as well as in streamlining its configuration.
- Designing and building a bi-directional bridge, built with Go, between Matrix and SIP for enteprise VoIP use cases, which is now a fully functioning commercial product that is currently being used in customer infrastructure.
- Redesigning the Python module interface of Synapse in an effort to make it more modern and flexible. This work has had a great positive impact on the Trust & Safety team, and helped planning commercial deployments.
- Participating in a reorganisation of backend resources in the Professional Services department, including assisting in the creation of a dedicated commercial backend team as well as helping design its processes.
- Designing and building a Secure Border Gateway, using Rust, as an application-layer proxy that applies access control rules on Matrix federation and client-server traffic. While this project had not concluded by the time I left Element, it was on track to enabling major commercial deals.
- Cozy CloudSystems EngineerDIGITAL AND ITOctober 2017 - October 2018 (1 year and 1 month)Brest, FranceI was part of Cozy Cloud's infrastructure team, which looks after the company's internal infrastructure as well as the one for its SaaS product, as a part-time systems engineer. During my time there I have been involved with:
- Defining and setting up a metrology platform using Warp10 and Grafana, in order to allow the infrastructure team to better observe the company's digital infrastructure, and better understand and address issues both with internal services and the production environment.
- Interfacing with various teams, both within and outside of the engineering department, to improve the metrology platform and allow these teams to access key metrics relevant to their domains.
- Modernising and automating the deployment of products from other teams, such as the company's main website, using Rundeck, to give these teams more control and ownership over their products and deployments.
- Defining and setting up a logging processing platform using Rsyslog, Logstash and Graylog to allow development teams to better investigate bugs, as well as to allow the infrastructure team to more efficiently interact with the backend development team to resolve production incidents.
- HarmonicSoftware EngineerDIGITAL AND ITOctober 2015 - September 2016 (1 year)Rennes, FranceI worked with Harmonic’s research and development teams to develop and improve video encoding and transcoding workflows and libraries.
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Education
- Engineering DegreeInstitut Supérieur de l'Électronique et du Numérique2018I graduated in 2018 with an engineering degree from the ISEN institute of engineering in Brest, France. I studied computer engineering, electronics engineering and mechanical engineering, and majored in robotics. While studying at ISEN, I've also organised technical talks (sometimes with outside speakers) within the school on behalf of student associations on topics such as free software, privacy on the Internet, ethics, Web development, game development, etc., sometimes in collaboration with other tech non-profits from the area.