Robert D. French
Knoxville, Tennessee, United States
Summary
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SeniorRobert French is a seasoned software professional with 12 years of experience spanning HPC, security research, and public-sector customer success. As a Public Sector Customer Success Manager at GitLab since October 2024, he bridges complex software deployment with research environments, building trust with government and academic clients. His background includes a Security Research Engineer role at Cisco and HPC/OpenStack work at ORNL, where he helped researchers deploy large-scale simulations on Titan and administered ORNL's OpenStack cloud. On the open-source side, he contributed as a backend/build-and-release engineer to the Spack package manager, adding and tuning packages for scientific computing tools from Vim to Grib API and the C++ Rest SDK. A founder and former freelance developer (Korovasoft), he financed college through software work, and he holds a BS in Mathematics with Putnam competition experience, underscoring analytical rigor. Based in Knoxville, Tennessee, he combines mathematical depth with practical delivery to translate research needs into reliable, scalable infrastructure.
12 years of coding experience
Stackoverflow
1reputation
0reached
0answers
0questions
Github Skills (15)
build-tools10
software-packaging10
hpc10
python10
package-management10
scientific-computing10
cmake9
netcdf8
c-language8
netcdf48
c-programming-language8
ruby7
dockers5
dockerce5
docker5
Programming languages (13)
Github contributions (5)
spack/spack
May 2016 - May 2017
A flexible package manager that supports multiple versions, configurations, platforms, and compilers.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer / Build & Release Engineer
Back-end Developer / Build & Release EngineerContributions:21 commits, 40 PRs, 70 comments in 1 year
Contributions summary:Robert primarily contributed to building and packaging software within the Spack ecosystem. Their work involved creating and modifying package definitions (package.py files) for various software tools, including Apache Serf, SCons, BBCP, Ferret, Tmux, Ruby, Adios, The Silver Searcher, CDO, NCO, Nano, PDT, Globus Toolkit, ITS Tool, UberFTP, libmesh, Vim, Grib API, C++ Rest SDK, demonstrating a focus on scientific computing and software build management. The contributions included adding new packages, fixing build processes, and integrating dependencies for various software tools used for scientific computing. They also adjusted the build processes, and provided new variants for existing packages.
compilerspythonradiussplatformslinux
robertdfrench/portunusd
May 2021 - Jul 2021
Avant-garde Network Application Server for illumos.
Contributions:5 releases, 108 commits, 1 PR in 1 month
application-servercgidoorsillumosprivilege-separation
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