I’m David Chidester, a computer enthusiast and professional software engineer who is passionate about Linux and open source software. I earned my bachelor's degree in 2019 at Willamette University with a major in computer science and a minor in history. Between 2019 and 2023, I worked as a software engineer for Thermo Fisher Scientific, a bio-technology company whose mission is to enable its customers to make the world healthier and safer. While working at Thermo Fisher, I worked both in DevOps and software engineering. I managed two DevOps automation servers running Jenkins and helped colleagues follow best CI and CD practices. On the platform engineering team, I developed an application using AWS lambda functions to tag new resources (such as ec2 instances, s3 buckets, sagemaker notebooks, etc.) with the email of the user who provisioned them, and other relevant data. I also created an SDK to transfer data between Microsoft Sharepoint and AWS S3 so that business users could easily get their CSV files into the s3 data lake. I co-authored two AWS blog posts dealing with integration between Microsoft’s technology and AWS focusing on Power Apps in 2022 and Sharepoint in 2023. I'm an advocate for professionals on the autism spectrum and also a member of a career networking group for neurodiverse professionals called AASCEND. I have also advocated for and mentored other young professionals with disabilities during my work at JVS. My dream is to one day make a meaningful contribution to the Linux kernel. Apart from computing, I also have a passion for cooking and I post pictures of my culinary creations on my Instagram page. In my free time I enjoy gaming, ultimate frisbee, and spending time with my dog, Shoko.