Sam Nicholls focused on stabilizing and improving the determinism of OCI manifest exports in the moby/moby repository, addressing a bug that caused checksum drift in tar exports. By refining the handling of filesystem timestamps, Sam ensured that the blobs/digest directory’s modification time was set to zero after the OCI manifest write, resulting in consistent tar checksums. This work, implemented in Go and leveraging Docker and backend development skills, included updating integration tests to validate tar member mtimes against image creation times. The changes enhanced the reliability and reproducibility of image exports, reducing nondeterminism for caching and continuous integration pipelines.