James Blair
Founder at Acme Gating
Oakland, California, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolJames Blair is a seasoned open-source founder and infrastructure engineer with 27 years of experience building and automating large-scale CI/CD and cloud systems from Oakland, California. As founder of Acme Gating and long-time Zuul project lead and OpenStack CI core contributor, he blends hands-on DevOps with backend development across Python, C/C++, Java, shell and TeX. He has driven robust CI tooling and workflow improvements—contributing to high-profile projects like Jenkins Job Builder, the Gerrit trigger plugin, DevStack and OpenStack Neutron—often improving build reliability, timeout handling and Gerrit integration. Formerly a Principal Software Engineer in the Office of the CTO at Red Hat and senior infrastructure roles at IBM, HP and Rackspace, he brings both strategic leadership and deep implementation experience. Notably, his contributions frequently focus on making developer workflows more maintainable and observable, such as refactoring for event-driven build memory and preserving inner exceptions for better error diagnostics. He pairs a pragmatic systems mindset with a long track record of refining developer-facing automation in major open-source ecosystems.
27 years of coding experience
17 years of employment as a software developer
BS Computer Science, BS Computer Science at North Carolina State University
Github Skills (32)
openstack-sdk10
python10
apidoc10
scripting10
java10
cicd10
javas10
automation10
script10
openstack10
api10
service-design10
build-automation10
yaml10
sh10
Programming languages (11)
Github contributions (5)
openstack-infra/jenkins-job-builder
May 2012 - May 2015
MOVED: Now at https://opendev.org/jjb/jenkins-job-builder
Role in this project:
DevOps Engineer
DevOps EngineerContributions:57 commits in 2 years 11 months
Contributions summary:James primarily focused on enhancing the Jenkins job builder configuration. Their contributions include modifying the build process, adding new builders and publishers, and refactoring modules for improved flexibility. They also added support for Zuul and Devstack jobs. The user’s changes improved the overall functionality and maintainability of the Jenkins job builder.
jenkinsjenkins-jobbuilderopendevjob
openstack/openstacksdk
Jan 2015 - Jun 2019
Unified SDK for OpenStack. Mirror of code maintained at opendev.org.
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:24 commits in 4 years 5 months
Contributions summary:James contributed to the `openstacksdk` repository by implementing and modifying core SDK functionalities. Their work included improving timeout handling using generators and refactoring code within the `shade` library to store inner exceptions for better error reporting. They also addressed typos in documentation and refactored code to remove redundant debug logs. Furthermore, the user updated and expanded the API documentation for the SDK.
opendevsdkopenstackclient-tools
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