Ian Howell
Senior Software Engineer at Microsoft
Greater St. Louis United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolIan Howell is a Senior Software Engineer with 11 years of experience specializing in cloud-native technologies like Kubernetes and Docker, currently driving engineering at Microsoft from Greater St. Louis. He combines deep Go and DevOps expertise with a track record of meaningful open-source contributions to flagship projects such as Argo Workflows, Helm, and Kustomize, improving core functionality, templating reliability, and YAML handling. Previously at AT&T he helped integrate cloud solutions for 5G networks, and his background spans teaching, internships, and production tooling that reflect strong practical and mentorship skills. A community builder, Ian volunteers leading local tech meetups and interview practice sessions, and he brings a persistent, problem-solving mindset that favors incremental improvements to developer experience and build/test infrastructure.
11 years of coding experience
4 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor of Science (BS), Computer Science, Bachelor of Science (BS), Computer Science at Missouri University of Science and TechnologyUniversity of Missouri
Github Skills (28)
unit-testing10
kubernetes10
testing10
charts10
command-line-interface10
workflow-engine10
charting10
go10
helm10
kubernetes-pods10
yaml10
command-line10
argo-workflows10
devops10
templating10
Programming languages (10)
Github contributions (5)
helm/helm
Feb 2019 - Jul 2019
The Kubernetes Package Manager
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:11 commits, 7 PRs, 71 comments in 5 months
Contributions summary:Ian primarily contributed to the Helm project by fixing template rendering errors and improving the error messages. They addressed issues related to parsing and execution errors in templates, ensuring that users receive more informative feedback. They also implemented and tested schema validation for `values.yaml` files. These changes indicate a focus on improving the reliability and user experience of Helm's templating engine and chart validation.
chartscharthelmpackage-managerkubernetes
instrumenta/kubeval
Jul 2019 - Aug 2019
Validate your Kubernetes configuration files, supports multiple Kubernetes versions
Role in this project:Back-end Developer & DevOps Engineer
Back-end Developer & DevOps EngineerContributions:13 commits, 15 PRs, 7 comments in 27 days
Contributions summary:Ian primarily focused on improving the functionality and usability of the `kubeval` tool. Their contributions include fixing bugs related to YAML parsing, adding features such as colored output and the `--directory` and `--skip-kinds` flags. They refactored the code to update the YAML library and introduced a configuration object to manage settings, and also added the `--exit-on-error` flag. These changes enhanced the tool's capabilities for validating Kubernetes configuration files.
golangkubernetes-configurationinstrumentaconfiguration-fileskubernetes
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