Johan Herland Software Engineer – Git Expert – Tool Sharpener Industriestraat 59, 2624 BB Delft, Nederland +31 6 19252349 johan@herland.net herland.net/johan jherland jherland jherland "Move slow and mend things"

Summary

• Passion for designing and implementing elegant and useful software solutions to challenging problems.
• Always looking for root causes and more fundamental solutions, rather than superficial patches and merely fixing symptoms.
• Shares knowledge and mentors colleagues. Excellent communicator from always studying and working in multilingual environments.
• Experience in distributed development with Git, contributing to open source, developing good tools to improve team productivity.
• Experience with all levels of the software stack:
  • low-level embedded Linux work, communicating directly with hardware components,
  • build systems, test infrastructure, CI/CD pipelines, both for S/W running stand-alone and embedded into H/W devices,
  • application-level programming, from high-level Python down to C on the bare metal.

Work Experience

Delft, NL/Remote
September 2022 – Present Tweag
Developer Productivity Engineer

• Senior consultant, helping clients improve the software developer experience with tools such as Bazel and Nix.
• Co-maintainer of FawltyDeps, a dependency checker for Python projects and Jupyter notebooks.

Oslo, NO
October 2011 – September 2022 Cisco Systems Norway AS
Software Engineer

• Platform developer in the Webex Devices team, part of the Collaboration Technology Group.
• Development of multiple generations of Webex/TelePresence video conferencing endpoints.
• Embedded Linux development, integration of open-source and 3rd-party components.
• Maintenance of build systems for application development towards various custom H/W platforms.
• Git expert: trained developers and administered in-house Git infrastructure.
• Improved the developer experience in a large and complex codebase (decades of development, various custom hardware support, actively developed by hundreds of developers across many timezones).

Online
May 2007 – November 2014 Git project
Contributor

• Primary author of the git notes feature for attaching useful metadata to Git objects.
• Active participant in the Git community.

Oslo, NO
July 2004 – September 2011 Opera Software ASA
Core Developer

• Maintainer of central components (Unicode and legacy encodings, selftest infrastructure, etc.), making them lightweight, efficient, and portable.
• Championed and implemented company-wide version control transition from CVS to Git.
• Unix developer until September 2007: Developed and ported Opera to embedded Unix/Linux-based platforms.

Relevant Skills

• Natural Languages: Native Norwegian. Full professional English. Elementary Dutch. Elementary German.
• Programming Languages: Python, C, C++, Bourne/POSIX shell. Learning: Nix, Rust, Haskell.
• Other Languages: HTML, CSS, JSON, XML, SQL, LaTeX, etc.
• Methodologies/Practices: Test-driven Development, Agile Development, Design Patterns.
• Operating Systems: Linux/UNIX user since 1996. NixOS, Arch, CentOS, Ubuntu, Debian, Gentoo, LFS, etc.
• Embedded Development: Embedded Linux development, Android, build systems for cross-compiling own and 3rd-party software.
• Systems development: How a modern Linux system is put together, systemd configuration, Filesystem Hierarchy Standard, etc.
• Containers/Virtualization: Knowledge of Linux namespaces and isolation primitives, Docker/Podman and QEMU.
• Security: Low‐level security features like Seccomp, SELinux, Linux Capabilities, ASLR, RELRO, stack protection, etc.

Technical Writing

Public Speaking

Education

Kingston, Ontario, CA
2000 – 2004 Queen's University
Bachelor of Science with First Class Honours

• Computer Engineering, Software Option.
• Received Dean's Award (above 80% grade average) in 2002 and 2003. Final standing: 84% grade average.
• Focus on software architecture, software development and real-time systems.
• 4-year intensive program with a final-year thesis project: Robot Pool "Straight-Shot" Planner and Executor:
  • Part of a larger research project in robotics and machine vision on creating a pool-playing robot.
  • Developed two calibration processes for Pool Robot in C/C++.
  • Published paper: Robotic pool: an experiment in automatic potting

Other Experience

June 1998 – January 2008 Herland Software (sole proprietorship)
Website development and administration

• Administered web and mail services for multiple customers and domains.
• Created web page layout and programming web applications.

Kingston, Ontario, CA
April 2003 – August 2003 Queen's University
Research Asssistant, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering

• Developed software for a research project in robotics and machine vision (Pool Robot).
• Low-level programming in C and higher level programming in C++.

Kingston, Ontario, CA
January 2003 – April 2003 Queen's University
Teaching Asssistant

• Assisted undergraduate students on laboratory assignments in a course on Data Structures and Algorithms.

Other Skills

• Driver's License: Dutch Class B.
• Professional Memberships: ACCU, IEEE, NITO
• Hobbies – Cycling: Road and gravel biking, cyclotourism, sportives, home mechanic.
• Hobbies – Music: Jazz Piano, music theory, playing various genres in big band and smaller settings.

This document is copyright 2004 – 2025, Johan Herland. Last Modified: February 2025