Aaron Kalin
Co-Owner at Slightly Furry
Seattle, Washington, United States
Summary
👤
SeniorAaron Kalin is a seasoned systems engineer and operator with over two decades in technology and 17 years of hands-on experience managing distributed infrastructure, DNS, and global data centers. He combines deep DevOps and SRE expertise—contributing to notable open-source projects like foreman and Datadog cookbooks—with leadership roles that tamed on-call chaos and scaled infrastructure automation for ML platforms. As co-owner of Slightly Furry, he also applies entrepreneurial grit to build Seattle’s first openly queer-owned cidery while mentoring underrepresented technologists. Comfortable from bare metal networking and BGP anycast to PostgreSQL and Kubernetes, he is known for pragmatic code contributions that improve deployability and observability. Outside the data center he’s semi-retired from day-to-day ops, now balancing craft beverage production with ongoing open-source maintenance and community advocacy.
17 years of coding experience
2 years of employment as a software developer
Stackoverflow
1reputation
0reached
0answers
0questions
Github Skills (30)
sensu10
cookbook10
postgresql10
launchd10
testing10
command-line-interface10
configuration-management10
rvm10
erb10
ruby10
chef-client10
automation10
infrastructure10
command-line10
datadog10
Programming languages (12)
Github contributions (5)
sous-chefs/rvm
Mar 2013 - Sep 2017
Development repository for the rvm cookbook
Role in this project:
DevOps Engineer
DevOps EngineerContributions:120 commits, 9 PRs, 19 pushes in 4 years 6 months
Contributions summary:Aaron primarily focused on maintaining and updating the RVM (Ruby Version Manager) cookbook. Their contributions include adding resource notifications to Lightweight Resource and Providers (LWRPs) to resolve Foodcritic warnings. They updated default ruby versions and attributes, improved test suite coverage, and performed general maintenance tasks such as merging branches and bumping versions.
rvmchefchef-resourcemanaged-by-terraform
sous-chefs/postgresql
Sep 2017 - Feb 2019
Development repository for the postgresql cookbook
Role in this project:Back-end Developer / Database Engineer
Back-end Developer / Database EngineerContributions:72 commits, 15 PRs, 36 pushes in 1 year 5 months
Contributions summary:Aaron primarily focused on enhancing the functionality and maintainability of the `postgresql` cookbook. Their contributions included creating a new resource for managing PostgreSQL access configurations, which involved defining properties, actions, and template modifications. Additionally, the user documented the resource, added support for comments, and refactored the code to remove redundancy and deprecate older methods. The user also made adjustments to the test suite to improve coverage and fix suite issues.
postgresqlchef-resourcechefmanaged-by-terraform
Find and Hire Top DevelopersWe’ve analyzed the programming source code of over 60 million software developers on GitHub and scored them by 50,000 skills. Sign-up on Prog,AI to search for software developers.