We are pleased to recognize Tom Daly as the Mifos Star Contributor in this August 2026 edition of Star Contributor of the Month. Bringing an incredible four decades of enterprise engineering experience to the initiative, Tom has been a foundational pillar and leader within our community, recognized for his extensive technical impact as our DevOps Lead and his dedicated mentorship of our interns.

Following a distinguished career at Sun Microsystems and Oracle, Tom pivoted his expertise in Java, databases, and Kubernetes toward open-source fintech. Since landing happily at Mifos, he has expertly managed our critical technical resources and cloud infrastructure alongside David Higgins. Most recently, Tom has been leading the Mifos Gazelle project, driving crucial cloud-native and DevOps modernization across our ecosystem. His dedication to building robust backend systems and nurturing the next generation of developers directly furthers our global mission of financial inclusion—or, as he poignantly describes it, the absolute privilege of “helping mums and dads feed and educate their kids.”

Tom Daly – Adelaide, Australia

Brief Bio:

DevOps lead at The Mifos Initiative. I spent the majority of my career 40 year career at Sun MicroSystems and then Oracle working on all things Java and database (which included Postgres and MySQL) , switching to devops for cloud and kubernetes for several years before leaving Oracle to join an Open Source Fin Tech project and then (very) happily landing at Mifos doing devops and Java.

Relevant Skills/OS Experience:

cloud native, Java dev, devops.

My Impact:

How I discovered Mifos:

My son introduced me to Mifos and to Ed.

Contributions I’ve made thus far:

I lead the Mifos Gazelle project and this is my main contribution, but also work closely with David Higgins on many technical management of Mifos resources (Github, Cloud etc).

Project I’m currently working on or planning to:

Mifos Gazelle and mentoring interns.

Impact I have had (or hope to have) on the poor:

Well I think Mifos can and does have an impact on bringing services to the poor, my son once made the observation that financial inclusion is about “helping mums and dads feed and educate their kids” if my efforts contribute to that in some small way … what a privilege.

What’s rewarding about working on the Mifos Project:

I think I answered that above, but I would add it is also been rewarding mentoring the young interns and trying to make a contribution to the start of their careers. It has been a real treat (this year especially I think)

Fun Facts About Tom:

If I could travel to one place in the world, it would be:

Machu Picchu (Peru)

Connect with Tom:

Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tom-daly-63b0a72/

GitHub: https://github.com/tdaly61