The CFEngine Champion Program

Aleksey Tsalolikhin

Aleksey Tsalolikhin (@atsaloli) has been using CFEngine since 2006. He has helped many operations engineers (including Nick Anderson) get started with CFEngine 3 through webinars, articles, and countless user group and conference appearances. Aleksey founded Vertical Sysadmin, Inc. to deliver on-site CFEngine training and consulting. He lives with his wife and daughter in Burbank, California, where, on his balcony, he tends the world's smallest garden.

Nick Anderson

Nick (@cmdln_) lives and works in Lawrence KS. He has been a Systems Administrator since 2002. He has worked in High Performance Computing, E-Commerce, Data Center, and Office environments. Nick is an advocate of open source software and shared knowledge. He helped form the LOPSA Mentorship program in 2010 and has been a contributor and supporter of the CFEngine Design Center. Nick has been using CFEngine 3 since 2010. He chose CFEngine for its strong scientific background, its simple design, small footprint, and distributed nature. When not in front of the computer Nick enjoys photography and spending time with his wife, two children and dog.

Dimitrios Apostolou

Jimis has been contributing to CFEngine core since 2013. He was named a CFEngine champion in 2020 for his voluminous contributions including open-sourcing custom measurement promises He originally hails from Athens Greece but now lives and works in Oslo, Norway. He enjoys low level systems programming and slurping Ramen.

Brian Bennett

Brian (@bahamat) has been a long time user of CFEngine and can easily be found on the CFEngine mailing list. He is also very active within in the Debian team. This year Brian gave us his "Case Study in CFEngine Layout" and his mini zero-to-hero introduction that one of our previous champions Aleksey Tsalolikhin delivered as a training session at LOPSA East. Brian currently works for Amazon.

Jon Henrik Bjørnstad

Jon Henrik co-founded CFEngine in 2008 and worked as Infrastructure Engineer and Product Manager until he left the company to pursue other opportunities in 2013. He holds a MSc. in Network and System Administration and has 10 years of professional experience. Apart from his employment in CFEngine he has been working mostly as a System Administrator within Finance, Oil & Gas and manufacturing. He also co-founded www.cfengineers.net in 2013 which mainly contributes to the community by providing CFEngine packages and tools. He lives in Oslo, Norway with his girlfriend and 2 kids.

Nicolas Charles

Nicolas (@nico_charles) co-founded Normation to develop Rudder, a configuration management tool built on top of cfengine.

Jonathan Clarke

Jonathan (@jooooooon42) is Normation's CTO, and an open source believer. He has been working on Open Source infrastructures since his beginnings as a system administrator. His work is now focused around configuration management tools, in particular Rudder and CFEngine. He is also a contributor to several open source projects including CFEngine, OpenLDAP, LSC and LTB. He lives in and loves Paris, where he enjoys good food, cinema and cycling around the city.

Seva Gluschenko

Klaus Kämpf

Klaus (@kkaempf) is an active and long-term contributor to various open source projects, from GNU tools to CFEngine. His main professional interests are systems and configuration management and agile principles in software development and project management.

Klaus is currently working as a senior project manager at SUSE Linux, where he packages and maintains CFEngine, among other distribution packages. He still considers himself a CFEngine rookie which helps him keep a fresh look at this tool. His interest in CFEngine is more from a technology integration point of view, rather than a systems administrator pov. Being a father of three boys, Klaus spends his rare spare time with coding, electronics, running, cycling, scuba diving, underwater rugby, and teaching his kids where to grab a hot soldering iron.

Marco Marongiu

Marco (@brontolinux) became passionate about computers as a kid, as soon as he could put his hands on his cousin's Commodore VIC20. He fell in love with cfengine in the early 2000's, after reading about it in a book. He started his career as a System Administrator in a Research Center in 1999, moved to an Italian ISP in 2003, and a Regional Government Agency in 2008. Finally, he left his beloved island of Sardinia, and moved to Norway in 2010, where he currently works as a Senior System Administrator for Opera Software ASA in Oslo. He co-founded one of the first LUGs in Italy (the GULCh), and is the author of several technical articles, a Free Software advocate, a Perl and cfengine enthusiast, and many other things that it would be too much to mention. He has a degree in Mathematics that he keeps hidden in a secret place.

William Orr

Will (@worr) is a relatively new contributor to CFEngine's core, and a drive-by contributor to many other open source projects. He's known within CFEngine largely for taking care of many of the 4k problems, adding global keys to bodies and hanging out on the dev mailing list.

Will works as a Senior Systems Engineer at LinkedIn, largely responsible for developing tooling and automation. At work, he evangelizes use of and contribution back to open source projects. Since starting to work on CFEngine, another LinkedIn employee has contributed to CFEngine and another is getting bootstrapped. Will graduated from Rochester Institute of Technology with a BS in Applied Networking and Systems Administration in 2013. In his spare time, he works on various FOSS projects, hacks on kernels and makes dumb computer jokes on Twitter.

Benoit Peccatte

Benoit (@peckpeck) lives in Paris, he has worked as a sysadmin, developer, and security engineer for several years where he had the opportunity to work with CFEngine v2 and v3. He returned to his preferred field of system administration, where he has been almost exclusively using and hacking open source tools for the past 8 years. He is now employed by Normation to improve Rudder by combining these experiences.

Loïc Pefferkorn

Loic (@LoicPefferkorn) has started using Linux as his main platform in 1999 and quickly became an avid open source contributor, including to Ubuntu for two years as a MOTU. He experienced the pressures of a fast paced, high availability environment and appreciates the peace of mind CFEngine allows him in handling several thousands of servers. Loic has been an invaluable community member. In the last year he has given us cfe-profiler and blog posts that explore the scalability and limitations in CFEngine. In addition to his tooling and writing he can also be found lurking on the cfengine-help mailing list helping other community members. In his words, he is also reponsible for "spreading good CFEngine vibes". He likes jogging, reading books, mind hacks and enjoying the pleasant southern France region.

Martin Simons

Martin (@Webhuis) initiated the Debian-team in June 2013 and as a result we are now having an up to date and state of the art Debian Standards compliant CFEngine3 3.6.2. in the Debian Jessie repository.

He did the successful CFEngine Enterprise implementation at DirecTV in the beginning of 2014. He now is the driving force behind The CFEngine Roadshow, the open source show case of a complete CFEngine solution. He is a member of the International CFEngine Community support team. He is happily living with his wife being a proud father of three daughters who left home to study at universities all over the country. The opportunity is to be able to spend more CFEngine time!

Mike Svoboda

Bas van der Vlies

Bas (@tvbas) is passionate about IT automation and he is active on many open source projects such as sali, pxeconfig, pbs_python, and email2trac. He has embraced CFEngine as early as 1996 and, among other things, has contributed to the CFEngine parser. Last year the CFEngine team has invited Bas to Oslo to improve the reporting of syntax errors in the configuration files. He has also been a tremendous help within the Debian team to ensure that the Debian repository gets up to date CFEngine builds. Bas lives in Amsterdam and besides computers he likes traveling, music, sports (cycling, squash, snowboarding and speed skating) and walking on the beach with his dogs.

Neil Watson

Neil (@neil_h_watson) is a long time cfengine user. You may have read his cfengine 2 cookbook or seen him helping other users in IRC or on the mailing list.

Diego Zamboni

Diego (@zzamboni) wrote the Learning CFEngine 3 book and can be frequently found on the mailing list helping others.

Ted Zlatanov