Joseph Smith
Founder at thoughtful.computer
Seattle, Washington, United States
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolJoseph Smith is a seasoned engineering leader and founder with 13 years of experience building and securing cloud-native infrastructure and developer platforms from startups to scaleups. He has led engineering and security teams at CircleCI, Chef, and Outer Labs, and now runs thoughtful.computer from Seattle, blending hands‑on technical work with strategic leadership. Deeply experienced in infrastructure automation, he has contributed to the popular sous-chefs/aws cookbook—improving EBS RAID handling and Elastic IP management for better Chef and AWS compatibility. Joseph pairs that technical breadth with people-focused leadership, having scaled teams and processes across acquisitions and high-growth environments. He also holds a master's in psychology, which informs his approach to team dynamics and organizational design. Colleagues would describe him as a pragmatic, operationally-minded engineer who still enjoys rolling up his sleeves to solve hard systems problems.
12 years of coding experience
21 years of employment as a software developer
Master's degree, Psychology, Master's degree, Psychology at The Seattle School of Theology & PsychologyUniversity of Oregon
Github Skills (17)
cookbook10
chef-client10
aws10
chef-solo10
devops10
ruby9
elasticsearchquery3
terraformer3
kubernetes-pods3
docker3
aws-elasticsearch3
elasticsearch3
elasticsearch-api3
kubernetes3
amazon-elasticsearch3
Programming languages (3)
Github contributions (5)
sous-chefs/aws
Feb 2014 - Feb 2014
Development repository for the aws cookbook
Role in this project:
Back-end & DevOps Engineer
Back-end & DevOps EngineerContributions:13 commits in 1 day
Contributions summary:Joseph primarily contributed to the `aws` cookbook, focusing on the `ebs_raid` and `elastic_ip` resources. Their work involved implementing new actions for managing Elastic IPs (allocation) and enhancing the `ebs_raid` resource by adding support for existing raids and reusing volumes. Additionally, the user made changes to support Chef-solo compatibility and IAM roles, indicating a focus on infrastructure and automation. These contributions improved the cookbook's functionality and AWS resource management capabilities.
cookbookamazonamazon-web-servicesawschef-resource
sysbot/chef
Jun 2013 - Jun 2013
Contributions:11 commits in 1 day
configurationdevopsconfiguration-managementansibleinfrastructure
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