David Cheney
Lead Copilot Proxy at GitHub
Sydney, New South Wales, Australia
Summary
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RockstarDavid Cheney is a seasoned software engineer and open source maintainer with 18 years’ experience building high-performance backend systems and developer tools, currently leading the Copilot proxy team at GitHub from Sydney. He’s a prolific contributor to the Go ecosystem—working on core Go, crypto, profiling tools, and widely used utilities like httpstat—bringing deep expertise in performance tuning, build/release automation, and runtime internals. David has led engineering efforts at VMware/Heptio on Contour (a Kubernetes ingress controller using Envoy) and has a track record of shipping production-grade infrastructure at companies like Atlassian and Canonical. He balances systems-level work (compiler/runtime changes, SFTP and SSH improvements) with developer ergonomics (dep, pkg/errors, httpstat), reflecting a pragmatic focus on measurable performance and reliability. A public speaker, author, and educator, he blends technical leadership with teaching, often turning profiling insights into actionable tooling and workshops. Notably, his contributions frequently sit at the intersection of performance and developer experience—improving how engineers observe, build, and ship Go software.
18 years of coding experience
16 years of employment as a software developer
Stackoverflow
5,655reputation
3.9mreached
52answers
2questions
mysql
top-5%
database-design
top-5%
java
top-5%
data-structures
top-5%
Github Skills (72)
dependency-management10
benchmark10
website-development10
package-management10
testing10
http10
file-operations10
security10
build-automation10
profiling10
command-line-tool10
cross-compiling10
pprof10
sftp10
ssh10
Programming languages (17)
Github contributions (5)
davecheney/gophercon2018-performance-tuning-workshop
Aug 2018 - Aug 2018
GopherCon 2018 Performance Tuning Workshop
Role in this project:
Performance Engineer
Performance EngineerContributions:43 commits, 9 PRs, 17 pushes in 12 days
Contributions summary:David primarily contributed to performance tuning and optimization within the Go-based project. Their commits included code examples for profiling with `pprof`, memory allocation analysis, and benchmarking. They focused on identifying and mitigating performance bottlenecks, as seen in examples for mutex contention, and compiler optimizations. The user also provided examples using various benchmarking techniques to illustrate best practices for performance improvements.
performance-tuning
pkg/profile
May 2013 - Oct 2022
Simple profiling for Go
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:7 releases, 1 review, 69 commits in 9 years 6 months
Contributions summary:David focused on developing a simple profiling package for Go applications. They initially implemented basic CPU profiling, memory profiling, and block profiling capabilities. Furthermore, the user added the ability to control signal handling and execution tracing. The commits demonstrate a focus on adding functionality and improving the profiling tools for Go applications.
goprofiling
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