DevOps Trail Blazers – People I Love to Follow
I love brilliant people, creating amazing products, and spreading the love just for the sake of community and better code.
I feel like people that awesome deserve respect and recognition – and don’t receive them often enough.
And while I’m not one for corny lists, I decided to forego my inner inhibitions that told me to avoid such a post at all costs, and to create one anyway.
DevOps as a Way of Life. Cloudify – Try it out. Go
I really wanted this list to be short and sweet, but I kept running into more and more folks that are just darn selfless and great, and deserve a shout out.
So…here is my definitive list of DevOps folks I love to follow on Twitter – and I think you should too.
Obviously I couldn’t get everyone in – and I may have just missed some as an oversight – so I’m opening this up for your editing and adding of DevOps rockstars you think should be in this list. You can fork the file on GitHub and add your edits here, and we will be sure to give you credit for the addition. I actually went ahead and created a Twitter list – so you can quickly follow everyone on the list, and your suggestions will be added there as well. Follow it here.
The Thought Leaders
Jez Humble – @jezhumble
Probably the father of all things DevOps and continuous delivery – he literally wrote the book on it (and owns the domain – pun intended). And really a standup guy. He answers emails. Even from people he doesn’t know begging him to come present at local, poorly funded DevOps conferences. He’s that Humble.
Patrick Debois – @patrickdebois
Patrick is the founder of the international DevOps Days events – and he takes every single one seriously. He is pretty much the person who coined the term “DevOps”. Now five years later – DevOps Days is one of the most successful dev/ops events around the world. The entire team behind DevOps Days is worthy of followership – and many are mentioned here explicitly – but really all awesome folks who toil effortlessly to spread the gospel. Isss nice!
John Willis –@botchagalupe
John (and @damonedwards of course) are the voice behind the popular podcast “DevOps Cafe”, and I personally had the pleasure of meeting John when he came for DevOps Days Tel Aviv. John’s in the business of ‘bringing DevOps goodness to all’, and is a regular speaker at DevOps Days events. John has been in the business of “devops” before the term was coined.
Adrian Cockcroft – @adrianco
Former Netflix & eBay, Adrian is the brainchild behind the brilliant Chaos Monkey we all love to hate, and is likely one of the most renowned cloud architects today. As an interesting and well rounded fellow – you can expect his stream to include diverse topics on top of technology, which is also witnessed in his recent defection from Netflix for a VC to expand his scope past media and cloud. I’m actually looking forward to seeing him speak in Israel next week.
Gene Kim – @realgenekim
One of the writers of The Phoenix Project (along with @kevinbehr and @gspaff), and founder of Tripwire. Just an all around brilliant guy with constant jewels of wisdom.
Matt Jaynes – @nanobeep
Founder, DevOpsU, and writer of the extra super awesome book – with special sauce – Taste Test: Puppet, Chef, Salt, Ansible. You should read it, and his blog.
Jeremy Edberg – @jedberg
This is the guy that used to run Reddit, do I need to say more? OF COURSE I DO. He has three presentations posted on Slideshare, and that’s all I need. A stand-up guy willing to share much about the many things he knows from meetups to international events. Vote up!
John Allspaw – @allspaw
John and all the DevOps badasses at Etsy are awesome. You should follow their EXCELLENT blog Code as Craft, and definitely make it out to one of their tech talks (which they take part in quite often) if and when you have the chance.
Uncle Bob Martin – @unclebobmartin
So I already called Jez Humble the father of all things CD, so I guess Uncle Bob is the…hmmm, uncle. Uncle Dad. He is the original trail blazer, and leader of all things agile. A writer, a lecturer, a craftsman.
Kent Beck –@kentbeck
Where one mentions Uncle Bob Martin, one must also tip one’s hat to Extreme Programmer and agile development thought leader Kent Beck whose primary commitment is to better code and processes. He is one of the original signers of the Agile Manifesto (along with Alistair Cockburn).
The Founders
Jesse Robbins – @jesserobbins
I live by Jesse’s rules. You should too. I find that they not only relate to DevOps processes, but life in general. From the guy who brought us Chef, he knows how to cook up technology, that’s for sure.
Luke Kanies –@puppetmasterd
Creator of Puppet and excellent b/logger, was hard not to put him in the funnybone category – but he deserves the well-earned status of Founder.
Marc Chenn – @marcchenn + Thomas Hatch –@thatch45
Founders of SaltStack and all around stand up guys.
Mitchell Hashimoto – @mitchellh
Founder of Vagrant and a bunch of other awesome technologies. Lover of open source, and automation – and is somehow everywhere all at once.
Michael DeHaan –@laserllama
Creator of Ansible and Cobbler whose feed is kind like NoTech (that is, in the spirit of NoSQL, not only tech).
Very Honorable Mentions
Since I don’t want this post to be excessively long and basically mention everyone on the interwebs – I’ll just give props in short to those who are brilliant and should also be followed IMHO, in completely random order:
@LordCope, @DrozerT, @auxesis I actually had the pleasure of meeting these folks in person at the first DevOps Days Tel Aviv – constant doers and movers in the international DevOps community.
Other people who have jewels of wisdom – and work for companies that are leading the pack in changing culture, from Etsy to Docker – @totheralistair, @kartar,@ashimmy. @duarte_vasco.
The Heart, Soul & Funnybone
You can’t do a DevOps roundup without giving shout outs to @haacked, @DevOpsReactions, @DevOps_Borat, @samj, @laribee, @jordansissel, @littleidea, and a personal favorite of mine @jayo_bc – who keep it funny.
The Local Crowd
There are also the local folks working hard at propagating DevOps culture in the local ‘hood, and this post wouldn’t be complete without thanking them for being contributing, active, giving, community members:
The obvious being @wix, @outbrain, @etoro – but specifically @orilahav, @yoavabrahami, @rantav, @liorsion, @nukemberg, @jfrog, @alonbecker, @devopsisrael as well as our own @uri1803 and @natishalom – who even have their own blogs on @devopsdotcom.
Thanks folks for continuously teaching those who love learning. (Borrowed from @eliranmal).
EDIT:
We’re currently in the process of organizing the second DevOps Days Tel Aviv (@DevOpsDaysTLV)…and it came up that we had no women on stage last year, and seriously wanted to rectify that. And I decided to take on this project myself, and suddenly I took a look at myself, and realized that in this awesome roundup I don’t have ONE SINGLE WOMAN. Not because there aren’t awesome women in the DevOpsphere…I can’t even explain it, oversight is relegating this. I’d like to be the first to take a look at myself and wonder why this is. So I apologize in advance, and I would like to tip my hat to the fine women of DevOps who I follow:
Katherine Daniels – @beerops
Katherine is the ops engineer at gamechanger.io, her Twitter handle says enough. Funny to follow and brilliant to read. She has an excellent blog that shouldn’t be missed.
Nicole Forsgren Velasquez, PhD – @nicolefv
On top of being a super-brainy Phd in Information Management, and a Professor at Utah State University, Nicole is a regular speaker on IT impacts and a foremost DevOps researcher. She recently took the stage at Velocity talking about the Business of DevOps along with Gene Kim and Jez Humble mentioned above.
Mandi Walls – @lnxchk
Aside from her day job, Senior Technical Evangelist at Opscode (now Chef), Mandi is basically a config management guru who travels the world spreading her wealth of knowledge.
There are obviously plenty more…you’re welcome to checkout my list of who I’m following and get inspired.
— Community Recommended Follows —