Tollef Heen
Senior Principal Architect at Cognite
Oslo, Norway
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolTollef Heen is a Senior Principal Architect in Oslo with 26 years of hands-on experience building and operating large-scale infrastructure, currently leading architecture at Cognite after heading their infrastructure engineering organization. He combines deep system administration roots—from Debian and Ubuntu core work—to modern cloud-native practices including Kubernetes, SRE, and automated provisioning honed at Fastly and FINN.no. A pragmatic open-source contributor, he has improved security-sensitive tooling (Yubico PAM), configuration automation (Chef, Jenkins Job Builder) and user-facing integrations (wee-slack), demonstrating both low-level security fixes and high-level automation. Colleagues rely on him for migrating legacy platforms to resilient, self-managed infrastructures and for making complex deployment pipelines reliable and auditable. Still active in Debian since 2000, he brings rare institutional knowledge of Linux distributions alongside product-focused infrastructure leadership. He holds a Master of Technology in Computer Science from NTNU and is known for quietly shipping practical, security-conscious engineering improvements that avoid unnecessary complexity.
26 years of coding experience
25 years of employment as a software developer
Norwegian University of Science and Technology
Norwegian, English
Stackoverflow
201reputation
5kreached
7answers
0questions
Github Skills (38)
debug10
slack-api10
python10
scripting10
configuration-management10
authentication10
user-authentication10
c1110
cicd10
ruby10
security10
c1710
chef-client10
chat10
automation10
Programming languages (16)
Github contributions (5)
wee-slack/wee-slack
Mar 2015 - Jul 2020
A WeeChat script for Slack.com. Supports threads and reactions, synchronizes read markers, provides typing notification, etc..
Role in this project:
Full-stack Developer
Full-stack DeveloperContributions:131 commits, 92 PRs, 95 pushes in 5 years 4 months
Contributions summary:Tollef primarily contributed to the core functionality of the WeeChat script for Slack, focusing on improving user experience and fixing bugs. Their work included formatting various message types such as join/part and topic changes. They also addressed backtraces, handled typing notifications, and enhanced nick completion. The user also added the ability to ignore alt text in unfurled URLs and other minor improvements.
weechatmarkersthreadsslacknotification
chef/chef
Nov 2009 - May 2012
Chef Infra, a powerful automation platform that transforms infrastructure into code automating how infrastructure is configured, deployed and managed across any environment, at any scale
Role in this project:Backend Developer & DevOps Engineer
Backend Developer & DevOps EngineerContributions:56 commits in 2 years 6 months
Contributions summary:Tollef primarily focused on enhancing the Chef Infra platform, a powerful automation tool. Their contributions included adding new features, such as supporting file backup paths and non-unique user IDs. They also addressed security concerns by implementing SSL certificate checks and securing validation keys. Additionally, the user made improvements to the codebase by removing unnecessary dependencies and refactoring existing code.
devopsdeploymentansibleinfrastructureinfra
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