Joel Vasallo is a Director of Platform Engineering with 13 years of experience building SRE, delivery, and security-focused platforms for cloud-native and traditional UNIX environments. Based in Chicago, he currently leads multi-discipline teams at The Aspen Group to deliver a multi-region, active-active Kubernetes platform and a paved-road developer experience. A hands-on leader and former DevOps/tooling engineer, he combines cloud networking, routing, and production automation expertise across AWS and GCP with practical experience in Terraform, Ansible, Packer, and CI/CD systems. He is an active open-source contributor—most notably improving Packer’s shell-local runtime OS handling—and organizes the Google Developer Group in Chicago, bringing community-driven practices into enterprise engineering. Joel’s background blends deep operational judgment with a penchant for clear developer workflows and measurable platform reliability.
13 years of coding experience
High School, High School at Saint Patrick High School
Bachelor’s Degree, Information Technology, Graduate, Bachelor’s Degree, Information Technology, Graduate at DePaul University
Packer is a tool for creating identical machine images for multiple platforms from a single source configuration.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Contributions:5 commits, 1 PR, 10 comments in 1 day
Contributions summary:Joel primarily contributed to the `shell-local` functionality within the Packer tool. Their work focused on adding the ability to specify runtime operating systems for script execution. This involved modifying the configuration, adding validation for operating system types, and refactoring the code to improve clarity and control over the execution environment. The user also improved error messaging related to OS configuration.
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