Ladar Levison
King at Lavabit
Dallas, Texas, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolLadar Levison is a seasoned DevOps and systems engineering leader with 14 years of experience running infrastructure and building reproducible images and environments. As the long-time technical lead at Lavabit, he owns reliability and troubleshooting at scale, blending hands-on plumbing with strategic oversight. His open-source contributions to prominent projects like HashiCorp's Packer and Vagrant show deep expertise in virtualization, container import workflows, hostname/networking management across Linux distros, and CI/CD provisioning with Packer and Vagrant. Comfortable in both backend tooling and infrastructure automation, he has improved Docker and Hyper-V builders and added robust unit tests to ensure cross-distro behavior. Based in Dallas, he combines an eclectic academic background spanning finance, political science, computer science and English with a pragmatic, problem-first approach to operations. Colleagues know him as a “technological warlock” and team linchpin who fixes what others call unfixable.
14 years of coding experience
2 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor of Business Administration, Finance, Political Science, Computer Science, English, Bachelor of Business Administration, Finance, Political Science, Computer Science, English at Southern Methodist University
Stackoverflow
246reputation
35kreached
2answers
0questions
Github Skills (29)
docker10
hyper-v10
scripting10
linux10
networking10
dockers10
ruby10
automation10
packer10
script10
go10
virtualization10
sh10
automations10
shell10
Programming languages (17)
Github contributions (5)
lavabit/robox
May 2016 - Jan 2023
The tools needed to robotically create/configure/provision a large number of operating systems, for a variety of hypervisors, using packer.
Role in this project:
DevOps Engineer
DevOps EngineerContributions:1 review, 2926 commits, 63 PRs in 6 years 9 months
Contributions summary:Ladar was responsible for provisioning and configuring a large number of operating systems using Packer tools, as evidenced by the changes to Gentoo installation scripts. The user made improvements to the configuration of networking on Debian and Arch Linux systems. Furthermore, the user appears to be involved with the CI/CD process, as the code changes suggest the use of a Vagrant configuration and docker images.
operating-systemsmanjarohypervisorsfreebsdconfigure
hashicorp/packer
Nov 2017 - Dec 2018
Packer is a tool for creating identical machine images for multiple platforms from a single source configuration.
Role in this project:DevOps Engineer & Backend Developer
DevOps Engineer & Backend DeveloperContributions:21 commits, 6 PRs, 154 comments in 1 year 1 month
Contributions summary:Ladar made several contributions related to the Docker driver within the Packer project, focusing on enhancing container import functionality and fixing related issues. Their work included modifying the Docker import command, adding configuration options for changes, and addressing formatting errors. They also implemented a function to parse template variables, showcasing their involvement in backend logic related to templating. Furthermore, the user contributed to Hyper-V builder enhancements, improving network adapter support and boot order configurations, suggesting expertise in infrastructure and virtualization aspects.
vagrantplatformslinuxpackerdocker
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