Rickard Von Essen is a Principal Cloud Engineer based in Stockholm with 14 years of experience delivering resilient, cloud-native platforms and continuous delivery pipelines. He combines deep hands-on skills in cloud engineering, DevOps, and change management with an agile, craftsmanship-driven approach to team delivery. Rickard has a strong track record at companies like King, PayPal and iZettle, where he helped productionize systems and shape platform strategy. He’s an active open-source contributor to well-known infra projects such as HashiCorp Packer and Telegraf, improving builders, FreeBSD support and system-monitoring plugins. Comfortable both in code and in shaping processes, he often bridges gaps between operations, development and release engineering. Colleagues describe him as a pragmatic engineer who steadily invests in automation and long-term operability rather than quick fixes.
14 years of coding experience
24 years of employment as a software developer
MSc Computer Science and Engineering, MSc Computer Science and Engineering at Linköping University
Packer templates for building minimal Vagrant baseboxes for multiple platforms
Role in this project:
DevOps Engineer
Contributions:34 commits, 24 PRs, 124 comments in 3 years 3 months
Contributions summary:Rickard primarily contributed to the project by modifying scripts and configurations related to building and managing baseboxes across multiple platforms. Their work included adding support for new platforms (e.g., OpenSUSE, Fedora) and updating existing configurations. A significant portion of their efforts involved adjusting scripts for various operating systems, particularly for FreeBSD, to ensure proper functionality and compatibility.
Packer is a tool for creating identical machine images for multiple platforms from a single source configuration.
Role in this project:
Back-end & DevOps Engineer
Contributions:553 commits, 380 PRs, 337 pushes in 5 years 1 month
Contributions summary:Rickard contributed significantly to the `packer` project, particularly focusing on enhancing the support for the Parallels Desktop builder. Their work included implementing features for the Parallels PVM builder, improving handling of SSH agent authentication and addressing issues related to the removal of CD-ROMs. They also addressed bugs and added enhancements to other builders, showcasing their broad understanding of Packer's functionality and build process. Furthermore, the user demonstrated proficiency in improving the existing functionality through changes to documentation and fixing bugs, demonstrating a commitment to code quality.
vagrantplatformslinuxpackerdocker
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