Rob Norris

Enhancing OpenZFS for Klara customers by building new features and resolving critical issues. Notable contributions:

• Rewrote the Linux vdev_disk driver to address longstanding issues with page and block alignment, resulting in a 10% increase in throughput and resolving a range of stability issues;
• Identified correctness problems in fsync() and disk flushing responses, and began a substantial program of work aimed at guaranteeing that all writes are properly flushed to disk;
• Documented the existing block deduplication system and designed and implemented the new “log” and “flat” dedup components, as part of the “Fast Dedup” feature that will debut in OpenZFS 2.3;
• Led research and prototyping efforts towards eliminating performance bottlenecks on low-latency NVMe devices.

Addressed complex technical challenges in Fastmail’s shared infrastructure, delivering critical systems improvements. Key projects:

• Designed and deployed a new storage architecture utilizing NVMe SSDs and OpenZFS, improving performance and scalability;
• Led a comprehensive MySQL upgrade, enhancing database performance and reliability;

Led a remote team of three engineers responsible for the daily management of networks, servers, operating systems and shared infrastructure software. Focus areas included mentorship, training and documentation.

Contributed to strategic policy and process development at the senior management level, with a particular focus on ensuring that project and change processes were constructed to encourage thoughtful design and development and good communication and documentation practices.

A sysadmin and developer in a boutique email service company, with a focus on infrastructure and shared software components. Notable projects:

• Led the setup of new datacentre locations and decommissioning of older ones, ensuring smooth transitions and minimal disruption;
• Designed and implemented a new authentication architecture supporting two-factor authentication and individual application tokens;
• Developed a deployment system that integrated work-in-progress feature branches into deployable artifacts;
• Built a standalone version of the Fastmail infrastructure and product, enabling development activities to be away from production and allowing for local integration and testing.

Led the technical rollout of Google Apps for a large-scale institution with 20,000 staff and 150,000 students. Notable projects:

• Implemented a system to migrate email and calendar data from Sun Messaging, Lotus Notes, and Microsoft Exchange systems;
• Implemented a system to robustly synchronize personal contacts between users;
• Developed web applications leveraging Google APIs for calendar resource management and message auditing.

• Created a personal project to support rapid edit-compile-test cycles for kernel development, enabling changes to be implemented and tested dozens of times a day, fully integrated with existing development tools and workflows without the need for additional hardware.

• Contributed to the OpenZFS codebase, focusing on codebase uplift by removing legacy code, improving internal documentation, and modernizing development tools.
• Actively involved in reenergizing the OpenZFS community through writing, presentations, bug fixes, and prototypes.
• Helped to ensure compatibility with new OS releases, particularly focusing on Linux.

• Led the development of a space adventure game in the tradition of Elite, with significant improvements to the physics engine, rendering system, UI framework, and Lua extension system.

• Contributed significantly to AROS, an AmigaOS clone, with work on the kernel, DOS, file systems (including FAT32 support), network stack, graphics drivers, and later ported GCC and WebKit to create the first native web browser.

• Co-founded and led the jabberd2 project, writing the majority of the original code and driving early development of the XMPP protocol suite.