Billie Cleek
Senior Staff Engineer at Lambda
Portland, Oregon, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolBillie Cleek is a Senior Staff Engineer in Portland with 20+ years of experience building backend systems, platform tooling, and release pipelines across startups and cloud providers. Currently at Lambda after multiple senior platform roles at DigitalOcean, they specialized in running large Kubernetes fleets and simplifying deployments for teams, including implementing a global service-discovery layer. A long-time Go advocate (since 1.2) and practical polyglot, Billie is an active open-source contributor — notably to HashiCorp's Packer, the go-mssqldb driver, and DigitalOcean's cloud-controller-manager. They pair deep database and SQL design knowledge (more than most developers, though not a DBA) with hardcore debugging, performance tuning, and architecture skills. Known for leading migrations to modern VCS, maturing release processes, and mentoring engineers, Billie emphasizes disciplined engineering, automation, and sustainable work-life balance.
12 years of coding experience
26 years of employment as a software developer
University of Arkansas at FayettevilleBS, Computer Science, BS, Computer Science at Missouri State University
Github Skills (26)
kubernetes10
cloud-computing10
configuration-management10
digitalocean10
automation10
packer10
database-driver10
go10
sql10
ci-cd10
mssql10
ansible10
golang10
ansible-galaxy10
automations10
Programming languages (10)
Github contributions (5)
digitalocean/digitalocean-cloud-controller-manager
Sep 2017 - Jan 2019
Kubernetes cloud-controller-manager for DigitalOcean (beta)
Role in this project:
Backend Developer
Backend DeveloperContributions:25 commits, 18 PRs, 12 pushes in 1 year 4 months
Contributions summary:Billie primarily contributed to implementing and maintaining core functionalities within the DigitalOcean cloud-controller-manager. Their work focused on integrating the Kubernetes 1.8 Zones interface, which involved modifying existing code related to droplet and zone management. These changes included updating the `do/droplets.go`, `do/zones.go`, `do/zones_test.go` and `do/droplets_test.go` files, demonstrating a focus on expanding the cloud provider's interaction with DigitalOcean's infrastructure. The user also refactored godoc comments and standardized casing in method parameters, enhancing code readability and documentation.
golangcontroller-managercontrollercloudcloud-providers
denisenkom/go-mssqldb
Jul 2015 - Jan 2017
Microsoft SQL server driver written in go language
Role in this project:Back-end Developer / Database Engineer
Back-end Developer / Database EngineerContributions:7 commits, 5 PRs, 10 comments in 1 year 6 months
Contributions summary:Billie significantly contributed to the `go-mssqldb` driver. They implemented database mirroring support and fixed issues related to failover partners. Furthermore, they added a new `UniqueIdentifier` type, including the necessary byte swapping for compatibility, and implemented the `Stringer`, `Scanner`, and `Valuer` interfaces, showcasing database-specific type handling. The commits also included improvements for error handling, connection management, and tests for the driver's core functionality.
golangsql-servermicrosoft-sql-serversqlgo
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