Helgi Þorbjörnsson
San Francisco, California, United States
Summary
🤩
RockstarHelgi Thorbjoernsson is an experienced DevOps and back-end engineer with 22 years solving hard infrastructure problems from San Francisco. He brings deep, hands-on expertise in cloud automation and reliability—particularly AWS CloudFormation, AMI/instance lifecycle handling, and production-focused scripting. His open-source contributions include meaningful work on Deis (a CoreOS/Docker PaaS) improving AWS provisioning and registry robustness, and enhancements to Percona and FRAPI that emphasize stability, configuration safety, and authentication correctness. Colleagues rely on him to untangle brittle deployment flows and to bake operational resilience into tooling and cookbooks. Notably, he pairs low-level infrastructure fixes with attention to developer experience—wrapping repetitive logic into reusable functions and improving testability. He consistently prefers pragmatic, durable solutions over flashy short-term fixes.
22 years of coding experience
English, Icelandic
Github Skills (26)
cookbook10
scripting10
mysql10
api-design10
user-authentication10
authentication10
bash10
chef-client10
php10
script10
aws-cloudformation10
aws10
sh10
chef-solo10
shell10
Programming languages (14)
Github contributions (5)
frapi/frapi
Jun 2011 - Jun 2012
FRAPI is an API Open Source framework, run it within your hosting environment parallel to your web app, mobile service or legacy system.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:15 commits in 1 year
Contributions summary:Helgi contributed to the FRAPI framework by addressing several issues and making improvements. They updated documentation and deprecated code, specifically removing unused dependencies. The commits show a focus on refactoring and improving code quality by changing function calls and bundling necessary PEAR packages. They also made a crucial fix related to authentication by adjusting the digest parser.
hostingapiwebservicemobile-web-appparallel
deis/deis
Sep 2015 - Feb 2016
Deis v1, the CoreOS and Docker PaaS: Your PaaS. Your Rules.
Role in this project:DevOps Engineer
DevOps EngineerContributions:17 commits, 18 PRs, 6 pushes in 4 months
Contributions summary:Helgi's contributions primarily focused on improving the AWS infrastructure aspects of the Deis project. They addressed issues related to CloudFormation, ensuring instance replacements were avoided during AMI updates. Their work involved improving AWS CLI queries for efficiency, wrapping CoreOS AMI fetching into a function, and fixing several related issues in the provision and update scripts. Additionally, they modified the codebase to export environment variables and address a bucket naming issue within the registry settings.
dokkupaascoreosdockerkubernetes
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.