Jesse Alford
Principal at nonlinear.garden
San Francisco, California, United States
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolJesse Alford is a Principal software engineer and systems thinker with 11 years of experience building and leading teams that deliver mission-critical cloud and platform software. He has deep hands-on expertise in deployment, CI/CD, and test automation—contributing to high-profile open source Cloud Foundry projects like cf-deployment and cf-acceptance-tests—while also coaching teams through acquisitions, reorgs, and large-scale operational incidents. Jesse blends technical craft (runtime-secret management, distributed system automation) with people-centered leadership, cultivating psychologically safe, high-morale teams that become practically self-managing. Now running nonlinear.garden, he consults on release engineering and team dynamics, writes about complexity and self-management, and experiments with Rust, Elixir, and LLMs. Colleagues value him for reducing friction between humans and systems—he ships, teaches, and isn’t afraid to delete code when it’s the right thing to do.
11 years of coding experience
13 years of employment as a software developer
Black Box Software Testing Software Testing, Black Box Software Testing Software Testing at Association For Software TestingWilliam Shakespeare Award For Causing Jerry To Kill All The Lawyers Problem Solving Leadership, William Shakespeare Award For Causing Jerry To Kill All The Lawyers Problem Solving Leadership at The AYE (Amplify Your Effectiveness) QuartetAll Things, All Things at Alpine Valley School
English
Stackoverflow
1reputation
0reached
0answers
0questions
Github Skills (15)
sh10
script10
infrastructure10
cloud-infrastructure10
go10
shell10
cloud-foundry10
web-deploy10
web-deployment10
devops10
scripting10
cicd10
yaml10
test-automation10
cd9
Programming languages (14)
Github contributions (5)
cloudfoundry/cf-deployment
Aug 2016 - Jun 2018
The canonical open source deployment manifest for Cloud Foundry
Role in this project:
DevOps Engineer
DevOps EngineerContributions:127 commits, 18 PRs, 65 pushes in 1 year 10 months
Contributions summary:Jesse primarily focused on enhancing the deployment and testing infrastructure for Cloud Foundry. Their commits involved modifying and creating scripts for transition testing, including adjustments to error handling and script functionality. Furthermore, they updated test configurations and added experimental ops files related to component enabling, indicating a focus on improving automation and configuration management within the Cloud Foundry deployment process. Their contributions directly influenced how components are configured, tested, and deployed.
foundrymanifestboshdeploymentcloud-foundry
cloudfoundry/cf-acceptance-tests
Jun 2016 - Sep 2017
CF Acceptance tests
Role in this project:Back-end & DevOps Engineer
Back-end & DevOps EngineerContributions:29 commits, 9 PRs, 21 pushes in 1 year 3 months
Contributions summary:Jesse primarily contributed to improving the test infrastructure and ensuring the proper functionality of acceptance tests within the Cloud Foundry environment. Their work involved modifying test helpers, updating import paths for dependencies, and refactoring existing code to align with changes in the cf-cli. Furthermore, they streamlined the timeout configurations for applications, particularly during push operations. They also updated configurations and tests to address and resolve potential build and deployment errors.
testingacceptance-testscff-wg-app-runtime-deploymentsacceptance
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