James Turnbull

James enjoys a masculine cocktail.

James is the release manager for Puppet and Facter. He is chief wrangler for the Wiki and the ticketing system – if either are broken then it is probably his fault. He’s almost always in IRC (jamesturnbull in irc.freenode.net #puppet) and is generally trying to be helpful. Say hi if you drop by… he’s in Australia and there is a chance he’ll be sleeping when you are awake, but in this line of work, you never know.

James also authored the first (and thus far only) book about Puppet. He is also the author of Pro Nagios 2.0 and Hardening Linux. (Rumor has it he is almost finished with Pro Linux System Administration)

For a real job, James runs the CERT function at the National Australia Bank. He likes food, wine, books, photography and cats.  He is not overly keen on long walks on the beach and holding hands.

Brice Figureau

Brice really does like board games.

After a 5 years trip developing 3D computer graphics software, a short journey in speech recognition based phone services, Brice finally settled in 2002 in working as half-time system administrator, half-time software engineer working on online game servers/clients for the boardgame publisher Days of Wonder.

Brice is managing the Days of Wonder production infrastructure, including corporate servers, web servers, and online game servers. He believes Puppet greatly increased is sysadmin productivity

Brice has been kicking ass developing stuff for Puppet. (and a few other contributions to open-source projects). Despite his current employer, he really does like boardgames. He is also interested in photography, and spends time reading sci-fi, fantasy, mystery & thriller books. he also enjoys, during deserved vacations, traveling abroad.

(Brice wanted to point out that he is French, which explains the outrageous French accent.)

Paul Lathrop

Knitting, Can you Digg it?

Paul Lathrop is a Senior Systems Engineer at Digg, which translates to “big nerd” in layman’s terms. He learned his alphabet on a Commodore 64, and somehow his mom was still surprised when he turned out to be a
computer geek. He grew up in Michigan, moved to Wisconsin after attending Michigan Technological University and Northern Michigan University, and finally settled in California in 2005. In between work and moonlighting as a consultant, Paul like to read (anything from Sci-Fi/Fantasy to books about mathematics), play tabletop role-playing games, knit, and go camping. He also likes to play with code, and tends to enjoy programming in almost any language. His favorite language is Lisp and his least favorite is Perl.

Paul discovered Puppet in late 2007 while searching for ways to make systems administration more craft and less work. After brief dalliance with cfengine and BCFG2, Paul found Puppet and started tinkering. Within a week he had automated deployment of new virtual machines for one of his clients; repeatable builds combined with globally consistent configuration won him over, but the speed at which he was able to roll this out cemented the deal. Now Paul uses Puppet for all of his operations work, from his smallest client who has only a single webserver to his day job where he administers hundreds of servers providing a wide range of clustered services. Paul believes that Puppet is the secret sauce which will help elevate systems administration from the realm of “glorified technician” to a true engineering discipline.

Paul Nasrat

Palace of Knossus, How playa is that?

Paul is a community contributor to Puppet and Facter. Amongst Paul’s current goals is to get Facter into better shape as a solid foundation for enabling new capabilities in Puppet. Paul is based in London, UK where we works at The Guardian, leading the web systems team. Paul’s work background has been both as a developer, including working on installation and package management at Red Hat, working as a build and deployment consultant, and as systems engineer. For fun outside of computing he enjoys traveling, hiking, reading, good food, wine and beer.

Nigel Kersten

All your OS X are belong to Nigel

He’s the MacOps Tech Lead for Google and manages a huge cross platform Puppet deployment there. Nigel’s academic training is in Philosophy/Linguistics, and his hobbies include keeping up on cognitive science/pop neuroscience, being obsessed with cricket, and hopefully raising two young children to be both intellectually curious and socially aware.