John Mccrae
Software Development Engineer at Chef Software
Hillsboro, Oregon, United States
Summary
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Rockstar🎓
Top School
Top expert inCloud Infrastructure and Automation Engineering
John Mccrae is a pragmatic software development engineer and IT leader with two decades of technology experience and a decade of hands-on engineering focused on automation, cloud infrastructure, and device management. He turned an internal idea into a commercialized MDM automation product that generated $4M in revenue and consistently drove high user satisfaction (IT NPS 97%). Comfortable both leading teams with LEAN/DevOps practices and writing backend code, he contributes to prominent open-source projects like Chef (ohai and chef), improving Ruby compatibility and Windows certificate handling. Based in Hillsboro, OR, he blends scripting languages (Python, Ruby, PowerShell, C#) with practical security and reliability improvements, and is particularly skilled at managing large fleets of Macs while keeping IT teams lean. Colleagues describe him as a builder who focuses on tooling standards that balance productivity with security, and who favors measurable, repeatable outcomes.
10 years of coding experience
12 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor's Degree, Marketing and International Business, Bachelor's Degree, Marketing and International Business at Stephen F. Austin State
Stackoverflow
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Github Skills (21)
wp-api10
oai10
windows10
winapi10
ruby10
powershell10
chef-infra10
ws-api10
security9
microsoft-azure9
configuration-management9
automation-testing9
automation9
azure9
automations9
Programming languages (14)
Github contributions (5)
chef/chef
Dec 2020 - Jan 2023
Chef Infra, a powerful automation platform that transforms infrastructure into code automating how infrastructure is configured, deployed and managed across any environment, at any scale
Role in this project:
Back-end & DevOps Engineer
Back-end & DevOps EngineerContributions:472 reviews, 944 commits, 1044 PRs in 2 years 1 month
Contributions summary:John primarily focused on enhancing the `chef/chef` repository by addressing certificate management within the Windows environment. They modified the `windows_certificate` resource and other Windows-specific resources to improve certificate handling, including adding features for fetching, creating and deleting, and also integrating with PowerShell. Additionally, the user updated the codebase to use more modern and efficient Windows API calls and added tests to improve the codebase. They also improved the security aspects of the codebase by updating registry access.
devopsdeploymentansibleinfrastructureinfra
chef/ohai
Apr 2022 - Jan 2023
Ohai profiles your system and emits JSON
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:6 reviews, 15 commits, 42 PRs in 9 months
Contributions summary:John primarily focused on updating the Ohai project to support Ruby 3.1, demonstrating an understanding of Ruby and its ecosystem. Their contributions involved modifying several plugins (ec2, azure, gce, openstack, rackspace) to ensure compatibility with the new Ruby version, specifically addressing platform-specific code paths related to Windows. The user also updated testing infrastructure, addressing dependency issues for the azure plugin. Additionally, the user made changes to improve the Azure metadata handling.
configurationconfiguration-managementohaiemitsruby
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