Jo Shields Email & Phone Number

Melrose, Ma, Us

As the Xamarin acquisition took time to fully integrate, the specifics of my role changed with time too - initially very similar to my release engineer work at Xamarin, with increasing engineering work within the .NET team.My speciality is making things compile where they aren't expected to compile - and that work manifested in major rewrites of the AOT compiler infrastructure and its packaging; the Mac Catalyst port of the Mono runtime and AOT compilers; and architecting in-house builds of EMSDK and WASI SDK. You might have even seen my work if you have ever used the Edge browser on Linux - a project I spearheaded during a company hackweek. I also helped external partners with their ports of .NET to their hardware.In January 2024 I moved to the libraries team within .NET, where I continued my work on the unified build project, and also helped with modernizing and refreshing the source.dot.net service

Debian Developer duties largely revolve around the packaging and bug-fixing of software for the Debian operating system, of which I oversaw about a hundred relating to the Mono open-source .NET framework. Ubuntu and derived distributions also benefited from my work here. My expertise makes me one of fewer than a dozen people worldwide with over a decade of experience with the specific idiosyncrasies of combining the worlds of .NET and Linux.Oh, and I also released the first major "SteamOS for non-Valve computers" distribution, Ye Olde SteamOSe (later renamed Stephenson's Rocket) which drastically increased hardware and feature support without breaking any of Valve's mechanisms. A number of those installer features were adopted by Valve, although none of that work carried over to the modern SteamOS 3+ used on Steam Deck.

Banbury, Uk

I helped to ensure that Linux and Windows releases of our software were produced in a timely, high-quality fashion, and available to the widest audience possible. This meant architecting some fairly complex, unique systems to deploy to over thirty different distribution-architecture combinations using a hybrid combination of cloud and in-house hardware. I also maintained our public Continuous Integration infrastructure.

Leader of a small systems management team answering directly to the CEO of an Open Source consultancy. Facing issues from simple desktop queries from the less technical user, through to helping to design and deploy complex integration of various enterprise software such as Alfresco or Gerrit.Approximately 70 virtual machines were under constant supervision, running services designed to allow easy working for a team of engineers spread throughout the globe – from email to VOIP and everything in between. I also helped to prepare a specialist desktop distribution for use by all non-engineer staff, to help reduce support workload and set up all services in advance.

One of two systems managers in a small team dedicated to the provision of OpenMP and MPI High Performance Computing equipment to University of Oxford researchers across a variety of disciplines. Typical day-to-day roles would involve dealing with user queries, tending to any hardware maintenance issues, and fine tuning of system software configuration. I also helped to design many aspects of infrastructure for new facilities, such as replacing NIS with LDAP for user account management, eliminating insecure usage of RSH across all facilities, and crafting of a new cross-platform GUI tool to manage user and system properties. These services have all been combined together into a customized Linux distribution for easy deployment across OSC infrastructure hardware.