Jordan Sissel is a veteran backend and DevOps engineer with 20 years of experience based in Mountain View, known for pragmatic open-source tooling that simplifies packaging and service management. He is the principal author and contributor to widely used projects like fpm and pleaserun, enabling reliable multi-format package builds and portable init script/service generation across SysVinit, Upstart, systemd and launchd. Jordan focuses on resilience, security and automation—adding timeout handling, credential redaction, and robust testing to production-critical integrations such as Logstash’s Elasticsearch output. Comfortable working solo as a longtime freelancer (self-styled “Triforce Hunter”), he blends deep systems knowledge with practical engineering craft and a knack for turning messy platform problems into reusable, well-tested tools.
An attempt to abstract this "init" script madness.
Role in this project:
Backend & DevOps Engineer
Contributions:300 commits, 31 PRs, 88 pushes in 7 years 10 months
Contributions summary:Jordan primarily contributed to building a framework for managing and running programs as system services, using Ruby and integrating with various init systems like SysVinit, Upstart, and systemd. They focused on creating templates and configurations to automate the process of creating service files. Their work included implementing support for user and group settings, and the addition of prestart functionality to the init scripts. Furthermore, the user incorporated systemd and launchd deployment testing and also added file generation features with the use of fpm.
Effing package management! Build packages for multiple platforms (deb, rpm, etc) with great ease and sanity.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Contributions:4 releases, 27 reviews, 2687 commits in 12 years 1 month
Contributions summary:Jordan's contributions centered around enhancing the fpm package management tool by implementing new features, addressing bugs, and refactoring. They introduced support for various package formats, including CPAN and Python packages, and extended features such as including configuration files, dependencies, and version constraints. These changes improved the functionality and reliability of the fpm tool, facilitating the creation of diverse package types.
rpmpackagingpackage-managerlinuxplatforms
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