Donal Evans Email & Phone Number

I am a software engineer currently working on VMware GemFire (formerly VMware Tanzu GemFire, formerly Pivotal GemFire) and until mid-2022, the open source Apache Geode project upon which it's based. Despite being my first software engineering job after leaving university, I received rapid promotion to my current level in recognition of my work, and was made a committer (in November 2019) and project management committee member (in March 2021) of the Apache Geode project.I began my academic studies in Physics, where I earned a First Class Honours MPhys degree at Swansea University in my home country of Wales. My final-year project for this degree was the design, production and operation of a wavefront sensor. This entailed building an optical set-up to produce known distortions to light and also the creation of a program written in the LabVIEW language that would process, mathematically analyze, and then characterize and visualize the distortions affecting the incoming light.Following completion of my MPhys, I began studying for a PhD at Swansea University, with my research focusing on producing optical nanofibres, and performing experiments using them. Using control software created from scratch and limited resources, I was able to produce fibres that were on par with the state of the art at the time. In addition to my own experiments, I also assisted with other lab work involving optics, and worked as a demonstrator and supervisor in the undergraduate physics labs, directly supervising 4 experiments each session, giving me ample experience in communication, explanation and multi-tasking.I ultimately ended my PhD candidacy after reassessing what a career in pure academia could offer me, and after some consideration chose to complete a second Masters degree in computer science. I graduated with Distinction, with my final-year project involving the creation of a program in C++ and OpenGL that would visualize large molecular biology simulation data sets.