Michael Rice
Poultry Farmer at RackN
Jewett, Texas, United States
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolMichael Rice is a pragmatic systems engineer and software developer with 14 years of experience building automation and virtualization tooling for large-scale operations. Currently a Senior Systems Engineer at RackN, he specializes in automated bare-metal provisioning and has a strong history with OpenStack and VMware tooling, contributing to notable projects like pyvmomi and its community samples. Comfortable across Linux stacks and languages (Python, Java, Groovy) he focuses on durable, production-ready automation that reduces toil and operational error. Beyond cloud infrastructure, Michael applies the same engineering mindset to sustainable pasture poultry farming in Jewett, TX, where he runs What The Cluck Farms. His open-source work shows attention to compatibility and modernization (e.g., Python 3 migrations and enterprise GitHub support) and a taste for playful problem-solving—aptly summarized as "Code, Potato, Yak."
14 years of coding experience
12 years of employment as a software developer
None, Computer Science, Networking, None, Computer Science, Networking at Odessa College
Stackoverflow
8,144reputation
328kreached
47answers
1question
python
top-1%
Github Skills (27)
git10
vsphere10
python10
apidoc10
packaging10
vmware10
vmware-workstation10
vmware-tools10
api10
http-request10
pyvmomi10
json9
build-automation9
github-api9
automation9
Programming languages (10)
Github contributions (5)
vmware/pyvmomi-community-samples
May 2014 - Apr 2015
A place for community contributed samples for the pyVmomi library.
Role in this project:
Backend Developer
Backend DeveloperContributions:33 commits, 3 PRs, 41 comments in 10 months
Contributions summary:Michael primarily contributed to the development of example scripts and tools for the pyVmomi library, focusing on virtual machine management tasks. They implemented new features such as rebooting and soft rebooting VMs, and also addressed reported issues by updating the code to use `WaitForUpdatesEx`. Furthermore, the user refactored existing code and added features around adding extra configurations. These contributions provide practical examples for interacting with VMware vSphere environments through the pyVmomi library.
placepythonpyvmomi
vmware/pyvmomi
May 2014 - Jul 2015
VMware vSphere API Python Bindings
Role in this project:Back-end Developer & DevOps Engineer
Back-end Developer & DevOps EngineerContributions:10 commits, 4 PRs, 42 comments in 1 year 1 month
Contributions summary:Michael made several contributions related to improving the `pyvmomi` library. These include migrating from `urllib2` to `requests` for Python 3 compatibility, replacing old-style string formatting with `.format()` syntax, and updating the copyright year. The user also focused on fixing build and packaging issues by removing unnecessary data files and shebangs.
apipythonvmware-vspherepython-bindingsvsphere-api
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