Quick Bio

Stewart is a Principal Engineer at AWS working on Amazon Linux.

Previously, Stewart worked for IBM in the Linux Technology Center on OPAL, the OpenPOWER Abstraction Layer – open source firmware for POWER systems.

Prior to IBM, Stewart worked for Percona as Director of Server Development with a deep background in database internals including MySQL, MySQL Cluster, Drizzle, InnoDB and HailDB. He was one of the founding core developers of the Drizzle database server project which he worked on at Sun Microsystems and later Rackspace. He started in the database world at MySQL AB working on MySQL Cluster.

Disclaimer

The postings on this site are my own and don’t necessarily represent any current or former employer’s positions, strategies or opinions. I do not speak for my current or previous employers.

Bio

Stewart works for Amazon Web Services as a Principal Engineer on Amazon Linux.

Stewart previously worked for IBM in the Linux Technology Center on OPAL, the OpenPOWER Abstraction Layer – open source firmware for POWER systems. He’s help the position of Vice Chair of the Technical Steering Committee of the OpenPOWER Foundation and sat in several working groups.

Previously, Stewart worked for Percona as Director of Server Development with a deep background in database internals including MySQL, MySQL Cluster, Drizzle, InnoDB and HailDB.

Prior to joining Percona, Stewart worked at Rackspace on the Drizzle database server focusing on getting it through a critical milestone of a stable Generally Available (GA) release. Prior to Rackspace, he worked on Drizzle as a member of the CTO Labs group inside Sun Microsystems.

As one of the founding core developers of the Drizzle database server Stewart has deep expertise in the code base. He had direct involvement in significant refactoring of the database server including removing the FRM, the InnoDB storage engine, xtrabackup, the storage engine API, CATALOG support and countless bug fixes. He also maintains HailDB, a shared library offering a NoSQL C API directly to InnoDB.

At Sun Microsystems, and MySQL before that, Stewart was a Senior Software Engineer in the MySQL Cluster team working on core code and features inside the MySQL Server and the Cluster codebase working on projects such as: geographical asynchronous replication, online add node, online backup, NDBINFO for improved monitoring and the Win32 port.

Things I’ve been involved with:

• OpenPower Firmware, including skiboot OpenPower firmware.
• LUV – Linux Users of Victoria – I’ve been on the board, given several talks at and currently a member
• Linux Australia – A community group which (among other things) organises linux.conf.au. I was the Vice President for 2003 and 2004 and Ordinary Committe Member for 2005-2006. In 2007, I was involved with linux.conf.au 2008 in Melbourne. In 2008 and 2009 I was the President.
• Sun Microsystems Inc – my former employer (before they became Oracle – who I never worked for), where I worked on MySQL Cluster as a Senior Software Engineer and later Drizzle.
• MySQL AB – my former employer, where I worked on MySQL Cluster as a Senior Software Engineer.
• No Software Patents – the very important fight against software patents.
• Linux Australia’s position on the FTA – Chapter 17 of the AU-US Trade Agreement aren’t good for Open Source.
• SGI – I used to work there.
• OpenDarwin – (more specifically, DarwinPorts) a BSD ports like architecture for MacOS X and Darwin. I no longer run MacOS X regularly.
• I was a Monash Univ, Honours Student in Computer Science. You can see my honors stuff up on the web at /honors/.
• I became an Honorary Member of the Monash Uni CSSE Student Club in 2002 after having been actively involved in it since arriving at Monash (2000).
• YoYo and GAUNIX – The Monash Uni General Access UNIX group, which runs the YoYo machine (aptly named after the reliability of the original hardware). I learnt how much Tru64 sucks here, and how to move it to FreeBSD. Then, I learned how much FreeBSD really does irritate me.