Introduction
My name is Steve Francia (he/him). I’ve spent the last 27 years as a software, product, and advocacy leader specializing in open source and developer experiences.
I’m best known for my leadership across several industry defining projects: The Go Language — Google’s cloud native programming language, MongoDB — the NoSQL database, Docker — the container engine, and Drupal — The CMS powering 10% of the commercial internet. I also authored Google’s Open Source Strategy and led Google Cloud developer strategy.
I love to code and have been fortunate to have created many open source projects which have gone on to capture mass attention including: Hugo — the world’s most popular static site generator, Cobra — The CLI framework for Go powering 50k+ applications, and viper — Go’s configuration framework.
My contributions to open source have led me to be one of the world’s most popular developers.
I frequently speak at conferences, podcasts, and user groups. My two best talks are Go – On the Shoulders of Giants and Drupal and the Secret of my Success. If you are interested in having me speak at your event, please contact me.
I’ve authored/co-authored two books for O’Reilly and have contributed/advised on several more — Powerful CLI applications in Go, Hugo in Action, Go in Action, and Learning Go.
Passions
My biggest passion is my family. I am the proud father of 4 children and uncle to 21 nieces and nephews.
We love to travel and in 2018 I was able to achieve a lifelong dream of taking our family of six traveling across Europe for the entire summer. We visited 20 countries and 40 cities in 8 weeks producing a lifetime of memories and a couple TBs of photos and videos.
As a family we love the outdoors and can be found hiking, camping, paddling, boating, sledding, or snowboarding. Regardless of the weather we’re an outdoor family.
I love taking photographs of my travels and capturing life’s precious moments. My gear of choice is Sony.
Music is the spice of life. I love music of just about any kind, but especially Punk and Ska.
Lastly, I’m a skateboarder. I’ve been skating for most of my life and while age has gotten the better of me, I still enjoy the ride and retaining as many tricks as I can. Skate culture is a huge part of who I am. If you are in NYC you just might find me riding my longboard or e-skate to the office. Look for a helmet with Go stickers on it.
Open source leadership
Creator, architect & leader of many of popular libraries, applications & frameworks
- Go – 95k ★’s – 1700 Contributors – 12%+ of dev market
- Moby (Docker) – 60k ★’s – 2100 Contributors – 35% of dev market
- MongoDB – 20k ★’s – 500 Contributors – 26% of dev market
- Drupal – 100,000+ Contributors – #3 most used web engine – Enterprise CMS powering whitehouse.gov, teslamotors.com, harvard.edu, etc
- Hugo – 57k ★’s – 700 Contributors – #1 most used static web engine – powering vote.gov, 2k.com, kubernetes.io, getboostrap.com, budweiser.com, brave.com, freebsd.org, kde.org, etc
- Cobra – 25k ★’s – 200 Contributors – #1 most used Go library – Framework for CLI applications in Go used by 50k+ applications including Github CLI, Kubernetes, Dropbox, Docker, OpenShift, etcd, etc…
- Spf13-vim – 15k ★’s – 140 Contributors – Formerly the most popular Vim distribution
Work Summary
Experienced Executive: 23 years of executive management experience setting technical and product strategy: establishing high-growth businesses, innovative technology teams and organization alignment adept at communicating complex technical topics simply to senior management, investors & clients
Team Builder: Experience recruiting, growing and leading large and distributed cross functional, engineering, advocacy, and product orgs (150 - 300+) with high productivity, cohesion, and retention while fostering a culture of inclusion & empathy
Entrepreneur: Responsible for building two “unicorns”: MongoDB & Docker (+$1B valuation) from very early stages. VPE/CTO at 4 NYC based startups. Founder of boutique development & consulting firm. Board and Executive advisor
Influencer & Storyteller: Keynote & featured speaker at 40+ international conferences including Google Next, LinuxCon, OSCON, QCon, CurryOn, Strata, Strangeloop, GopherCon, MongoDB, DockerCon, BigData Paris, Hack + Startup, DrupalCon, RootsTech, SORT, SINFO. Organizer of 30+ conferences & developer summits. O’Reilly author, blogger, with articles published in major industry publications
Open source: 25+ years experience including leading 6 of the largest open source projects (Go, Docker, Hugo, MongoDB, Drupal, Cobra), defining Google’s open source strategy, and creating multiple projects with broad adoption and vibrant contributor & user communities. Top 50 most popular engineers on Github
Technology expertise: 26 years of experience as developer, operator & data architect authoring and contributing to some of the most widely used and respected technologies. Extraordinary breadth and depth across operating systems (Linux, Windows, Kubernetes, Serverless), languages (Go, Python, JS, PHP, Scala, Java, Perl, Ruby, Rust), databases (SQL, NoSQL, BigData, stream, etc), web and mobile.
CV
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PDF format upon request