Ben Thomasson
Principal Software Engineer at Ansible by Red Hat
Raleigh, North Carolina, United States
Summary
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Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolBen Thomasson is a Principal Software Engineer with 17 years of experience specializing in network automation, visualization, and verification, now architecting Event Driven Ansible at Ansible by Red Hat. He blends deep networking domain knowledge from roles at Cisco and Cumulus with full-stack engineering skills, contributing front-end enhancements to the widely used AWX project and backend portability and testing improvements to ansible-runner. Ben has led efforts to simplify network automation through intuitive UIs, analytics, and cloud integrations, and has experience building D3/Django systems that track complex build and test matrices. He is comfortable across the stack—JavaScript, Python, Django, and DevOps tooling—and focuses on reliability and platform portability. Colleagues rely on him to turn intricate network operations into practical, auditable automation workflows. Based in Raleigh, NC, he brings a pragmatic engineering approach informed by long-term, production-scale deployments.
17 years of coding experience
15 years of employment as a software developer
North Carolina State University
Stackoverflow
1reputation
0reached
0answers
0questions
Github Skills (19)
javascript10
python10
configuration-management10
automation10
front-end-development10
ansible10
ansible-galaxy10
automations10
testing9
react9
lessc8
operating-system8
linux8
api6
integrations6
Programming languages (10)
Github contributions (5)
ansible/awx
Mar 2017 - Feb 2020
AWX provides a web-based user interface, REST API, and task engine built on top of Ansible. It is one of the upstream projects for Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform.
Role in this project:
Full-stack Developer
Full-stack DeveloperContributions:3 reviews, 71 commits, 18 PRs in 3 years
Contributions summary:Ben primarily focused on front-end development within the Ansible AWX project, demonstrating skills in JavaScript and related technologies. The first commit involved UI adjustments within the less files and code differences in smart-search.block.less, which suggests UI bug fixes. The following two commits were focused on refactoring code and changing javascript files, switching from .success to .then, and .error to .catch, showcasing a knowledge of asynchronous JavaScript programming.
ansibleansible-automation-platformredhatrestrest-api
ansible/ansible-runner
Jun 2018 - Feb 2019
A tool and python library that helps when interfacing with Ansible directly or as part of another system whether that be through a container image interface, as a standalone tool, or as a Python module that can be imported. The goal is to provide a stable and consistent interface abstraction to Ansible.
Role in this project:Backend & DevOps Engineer
Backend & DevOps EngineerContributions:34 commits, 20 PRs, 1 push in 8 months
Contributions summary:Ben primarily focused on improving the stability, portability, and functionality of the Ansible Runner tool. They addressed issues related to platform compatibility by replacing platform-specific functions with portable equivalents. Furthermore, the user enhanced the tool by adding features such as ad-hoc support, fixing event handling, and incorporating testing improvements to ensure the tool's reliability and usability. These contributions suggest a combined focus on backend development and DevOps aspects.
ansiblecontainer-imagepythonpython-modules
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