Ben Johnson
Co-Founder at Tero
California, United States
Summary
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RockstarBen Johnson is a veteran builder and engineer with 17 years of experience focused on observability and high-performance data pipelines. As co-founder of Timber.io and creator of the open-source Vector project—later acquired by Datadog—he has led teams to production-grade tooling adopted by organizations like Apple, NASA, and HashiCorp. At Datadog he shepherded Vector into the Observability Pipelines product as a Senior Engineering Manager, combining hands-on CI/CD and automation expertise with product integration at scale. Earlier roles include founding SaaS and marketplace startups where he architected backend systems and authentication, contributing substantial Ruby open-source work such as authlogic and searchlogic. Based in California, he now co-founded Tero to pursue a fundamentally different approach to observability, bringing both operational rigor and a founder’s appetite for reinvention. Colleagues know him for pragmatic engineering, deep CI/Docker/DevOps fluency, and a knack for turning open-source projects into commercial products.
18 years of coding experience
17 years of employment as a software developer
Github Skills (30)
git10
docker10
session-management10
scripting10
testing10
user-authentication10
authentication10
object-oriented-programming10
dockers10
cicd10
ruby10
automation10
script10
yaml10
activerecord10
Programming languages (23)
Github contributions (5)
vectordotdev/vector
Mar 2019 - Aug 2022
A high-performance observability data pipeline.
Role in this project:
DevOps Engineer & Automation Engineer
DevOps Engineer & Automation EngineerContributions:826 reviews, 1305 commits, 1057 PRs in 3 years 5 months
Contributions summary:Ben primarily focused on improving the build and release process for the Vector project. Their contributions included updating the CircleCI build scripts to more efficiently handle releases and deployments, adding and improving the Docker build process, and managing dependencies in the CI environment. The work involved significant shell scripting and Git integration for managing tags, versions, and artifact uploads.
observability-datalogsmetricsobservabilityforwarder
binarylogic/settingslogic
Oct 2008 - Dec 2012
A simple and straightforward settings solution that uses an ERB enabled YAML file and a singleton design pattern.
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:67 commits in 4 years 2 months
Contributions summary:Ben primarily focused on refactoring and improving the settings logic library. They renamed the library and its internal components, demonstrating a good understanding of the project's overall architecture. Additionally, they addressed documentation issues and fixed typos, indicating a commitment to code quality and usability. The user also refactored the code to define methods during method_missing and include environment-specific settings.
erbsingletonyaml
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