I find technologies that matter early and build the ecosystems that carry them to scale. I’ve been doing it for thirty years. The pattern is always the same: great technology is necessary but never sufficient. What makes it last is the teams, cultures, and communities you build around it.
Career
I joined MongoDB as employee #24 and built the developer experience that carried it to the #1 NoSQL database. At Docker, I led core engineering and helped create the container standards (OCI, CNCF) the industry now runs on. At Google, I led Go as it grew from 400,000 developers to 4.5 million and co-architected Go Modules with Russ Cox. At Two Sigma, I built AI platforms for some of the hardest problems in finance.
Today I’m independent again. I steward my open source projects, write, and am building a new venture. More on that soon.
Open Source
I love to code. I created Hugo, Cobra, and Viper. Together they’ve earned 197,000+ GitHub stars and a place among the most-adopted engineers on GitHub. Hugo powers this site.
I’m a GitHub Star and a Google Developer Expert.
Created:
- Hugo, 88k ★. #1 static site engine, powering vote.gov, kubernetes.io, brave.com, freebsd.org, kde.org
- Cobra, 44k ★. #1 CLI framework for Go, used by 150k+ applications including the GitHub CLI, Kubernetes, Docker, and Dropbox
- Viper, 30k ★. Go’s configuration framework, used by 100k+ libraries and applications
- spf13-vim, 16k ★. The most popular Vim distribution for over a decade
Led:
- Go, 134k ★. Product lead for the language and ecosystem, serving 4.5M+ developers
- Docker / Moby, 71k ★. Engineering leadership for the container platform
- MongoDB, 30k ★. Engineering, docs, and ecosystem leadership for the #1 NoSQL database
- Drupal. Board member; #3 most-used web engine, 100,000+ contributors
Speaking & Writing
I’ve keynoted 40+ international conferences, including Google Next, LinuxCon, and OSCON, and organized 30+ more, including GopherCon, DockerCon, and MongoDB Days. My two best talks are Go: On the Shoulders of Giants and Drupal and the Secret of My Success. If you’d like me to speak at your event, contact me.
I wrote MongoDB and PHP and co-authored the Bad Data Handbook for O’Reilly. I also contributed to or advised on Powerful Command-Line Applications in Go, Hugo in Action, Go in Action, and Learning Go.
If that interests you, subscribe to Signal vs. Nil, my newsletter.
Life
My biggest passion is my family. I’m the proud father of four and uncle to 23 nieces and nephews.
We love to travel. In 2018 we spent an entire summer crossing Europe as a family of six: 20 countries, 40 cities, 8 weeks, and a couple of terabytes of photos and video. We’re an outdoor family in every season, hiking, camping, paddling, boating, sledding, snowboarding.
I photograph all of it. Sony, if you’re wondering.
Music is the spice of life. I’ll listen to almost anything, but punk and ska have my heart.
And I’m a skateboarder. I’ve been skating most of my life, and while age has taken a few tricks, it hasn’t taken the ride. Skate culture is a huge part of who I am. Look for the helmet with the Go stickers on it.
CV
My full CV is available here. PDF on request.