Ben Ford
CEO And Cofounder at Puppet Community
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 (23)
Github contributions (5)
rodjek/puppet-lint
Jun 2016 - Aug 2021
Check that your Puppet manifests conform to the style guide
Role in this project:
QA Engineer / Test Automation Engineer
QA Engineer / Test Automation EngineerContributions:42 commits, 33 PRs, 23 pushes in 5 years 2 months
Contributions summary:Ben primarily focused on improving the robustness and functionality of tests within the `puppet-lint` project. This involved modifying existing test suites, introducing new test cases, and ensuring compatibility across different Ruby versions. The user also implemented features like disabling checks and the handling of backslashes. Their contributions directly enhanced the project's testing infrastructure.
puppet
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.
puppetr10klinux-puppet-modulearchlinux-puppet-modulecentos-puppet-module
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