Ben Ford
CEO And Cofounder at Overlook InfraTech
Portland, Oregon, United States
Summary
🤩
RockstarBen Ford is a seasoned developer advocate and founder with 14 years of experience building developer tools, running communities, and shipping production automation for Puppet and Postgres ecosystems. As CEO and cofounder of Overlook InfraTech and a long-time Puppet community leader, he blends product strategy, community growth, and hands-on engineering across DevOps, backend, and frontend work. His open-source contributions include impactful fixes and features in major Puppet projects—stdlib, puppet-r10k, puppetlabs-postgresql and the widely used showoff presentation tool—demonstrating deep expertise in infrastructure automation and developer UX. Ben is equally comfortable authoring documentation, hardening CI/test suites, or adding UI polish, and he has a track record of reducing operational friction (for example, adding lockfile protection to r10k and deferrable EPP support in stdlib). Based in Portland, he pairs technical problem-solving with a genuine knack for community engagement and mentoring, and he even runs marathons in minimalist "finger" shoes—evidence of discipline and unconventional focus.
14 years of coding experience
16 years of employment as a software developer
Stackoverflow
46reputation
175reached
2answers
0questions
Github Skills (40)
github-ci10
javascript10
puppeteer10
postgresql10
puppet10
webhooks10
testing10
css10
puppet-bolt10
rspec10
r10k10
cicd10
ruby10
automation10
python-modules10
Programming languages (22)
Github contributions (5)
puppetlabs/puppetlabs-stdlib
Aug 2015 - Jul 2022
Puppet Labs Standard Library module
Role in this project:
Backend Developer
Backend DeveloperContributions:13 reviews, 12 commits, 22 PRs in 7 years
Contributions summary:Ben contributed to the Puppet Labs Standard Library module by adding a new fact related to service providers, enhancing the module's ability to manage services. They also made several code adjustments including clarifying function examples and fixing a syntax issue. Furthermore, the user updated the `pick` function in `stdlib` to handle variables and introduced a deferrable EPP function.
standard-librarysupportedpuppet
voxpupuli/puppet-r10k
Nov 2014 - Dec 2017
Setup and configure r10k for use with git based environments in puppet
Role in this project:DevOps Engineer
DevOps EngineerContributions:17 commits, 9 PRs, 13 comments in 3 years 1 month
Contributions summary:Ben primarily focused on improving the functionality and reliability of the `voxpupuli/puppet-r10k` repository by adding new features and addressing existing issues. Their work included introducing the ability to respond to specific events, enhancing the webhook configuration, and implementing a lockfile to mitigate race conditions. Additionally, the user made modifications to ensure compatibility with the puppet environment.
r10kpuppetlinux-puppet-moduleconfigureenvironments
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.