Rick Sherman
Senior Manager, Technical Advocacy at Datadog
Missouri, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolRick Sherman is a seasoned technical advocacy leader with 12+ years of hands-on experience in network automation, DevOps, and developer relations, currently leading Product Advocacy at Datadog. He builds and scales teams of former practitioners who create conference-grade talks, open-source integrations, and practical content that solve real-world engineering problems rather than just promoting product features. His background includes deep engineering roles at Juniper and Puppet—where he authored and maintained automation libraries and CI/build tooling—and measurable operational wins like redesigning cloud infrastructure to cut opex by 95%. Rick combines technical credibility (contributions to Juniper’s py-junos and Ansible Junos modules) with strategic partner and go-to-market experience from alliances roles. He’s known for coaching engineers into public-facing technical leaders, and for preferring evidence-driven advocacy rooted in production experience. Based in Missouri, he focuses on creating environments where engineers thrive as both contributors and community-facing advocates.
12 years of coding experience
18 years of employment as a software developer
AAS Advanced Network Design, AAS Advanced Network Design at St. Charles Community CollegeHazelwood West
German, English
Github Skills (14)
ansible-galaxy10
automation10
rs10
automations10
puppeteer10
restructuredtext10
devops10
python10
puppet10
sphinx10
documentation10
ansible10
cicd9
vagrant9
Programming languages (13)
Github contributions (5)
Juniper/py-junos-eznc
Feb 2014 - Jul 2015
Python library for Junos automation
Role in this project:
DevOps Engineer
DevOps EngineerContributions:6 releases, 275 commits, 72 PRs in 1 year 5 months
Contributions summary:Rick primarily focused on improving the build and deployment processes. Their contributions included creating Vagrant configurations and Puppet modules for various operating systems, enabling the installation of the `py-junos-eznc` library from either PyPi or Git. They added more guest operating systems to the build environments and fixed issues with the underlying build and deployment. They also made updates to unit tests.
python-librarynetmikopythonjunosnapalm
Juniper/ansible-junos-stdlib
Apr 2014 - Jul 2015
Junos modules for Ansible
Role in this project:Technical Writer
Technical WriterContributions:2 releases, 65 commits, 30 PRs in 1 year 3 months
Contributions summary:Rick's commits primarily involve modifications to the documentation files within the repository. These changes include initial configuration for Sphinx, merging in upstream changes to the documentation, and fixing issues to improve the documentation for ReadTheDocs. The user also modified the documentation generation scripts and updated the documentation template to include the version and related information.
ansiblepythonjunos
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