John Barker
Principal Engineer at Red Hat
United Kingdom
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolJohn Barker is a Principal Engineer with 14 years of experience leading infrastructure, DevOps, and automation efforts at Red Hat and other enterprise technology firms. He combines deep hands-on expertise in CI/CD, testing infrastructure, and Ansible module development with strong technical writing skills, having improved core Ansible projects and documentation used widely across the automation community. His background spans lab and release engineering at IBM and Transitive, where he built test frameworks and formalized processes that scaled across architectures from x64 to POWER and SPARC. Based in the UK, he is an active contributor to Ansible’s ecosystem—authoring modules, hardening CI pipelines, and enhancing developer workflows—which reflects both breadth and practical impact. An uncommon strength is his ability to translate complex platform constraints into clear documentation and repeatable CI practices that accelerate team delivery.
15 years of coding experience
10 years of employment as a software developer
BSc (hons) Computer Science, BSc (hons) Computer Science at The University of Manchester
Stackoverflow
73reputation
90kreached
6answers
0questions
Github Skills (35)
markdown10
github-ci10
docker10
restructuredtext10
github10
python10
testing10
ansible-collections10
configuration-management10
bash10
dockers10
cicd10
markdown-it10
yaml10
ansible10
Programming languages (22)
Github contributions (5)
ansible/community
Mar 2016 - Oct 2021
This repository is being archived. See https://github.com/ansible-community/presentations and https://github.com/ansible-community/meetings for the new locations
Role in this project:
DevOps Engineer
DevOps EngineerContributions:11 reviews, 147 commits, 119 PRs in 5 years 7 months
Contributions summary:John primarily contributed to the development of documentation related to network module testing, specifically integration and unit tests for Ansible Network modules. They created and updated documentation files, detailing test structures, examples, and the process for running tests, including code coverage analysis. Their work also included setting up the testing infrastructure, such as inventory files and test resources, and explaining how to leverage the testing features within the Ansible ecosystem.
ansible
ansible/ansible-modules-extras
Dec 2014 - Oct 2016
Ansible extra modules - these modules ship with ansible
Role in this project:Full-stack Developer
Full-stack DeveloperContributions:4 commits, 133 PRs, 108 pushes in 1 year 10 months
Contributions summary:John contributed significantly to the `ansible/ansible-modules-extras` repository, demonstrating skills in module development and documentation. They added a new module `udm_share` which suggests backend logic, implemented changes in existing modules such as `debconf.py` and `dynamodb_table.py`, and addressed typos and documentation updates in several files. These commits span diverse aspects of the repository's codebase, showing proficiency in working with Ansible modules.
ansible
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