About Me

I’m Jason Barnett, a Principal Developer Experience Engineer at Altana.

I got started in tech at 16 doing computer repair with my dad, then went out on my own running a small business fixing machines around the San Francisco Bay Area. That hands-on foundation eventually led me into infrastructure and operations work at Mindjet (formerly Spigit, now part of Planview IdeaPlace), where I worked on their Technical Operations team doing infrastructure automation.

In November 2015 I joined Bridgewater. I wore a lot of hats there and it pushed me to grow in ways I hadn’t anticipated. I’m grateful for the experience and the people I met.

I’ve been at Altana for a while now, and it’s the first company I’ve worked at where I’m genuinely proud of the mission.

Open Source

Contributing to open source has been one of the more consistently satisfying parts of my career. It started around 2015 and has never really stopped.

One that sticks with me from early on is the :create, :delete, and :configure actions I added to Chef’s windows_service resource. The resource already existed, but its only Windows-specific action was :configure_startup; you could start, stop, enable, or disable a service via inherited actions, but you couldn’t create or delete one. At Bridgewater we needed to actually create and delete services from Chef, and we were doing increasingly convoluted PowerShell workarounds to get there. Adding those actions natively meant the workarounds just went away, for us and for anyone else in the same situation. It ended up getting mentioned at ChefConf and in some intro videos, which was a bit of a surreal moment. I was one of the top 50 contributors to Chef’s core around that time.

Since then the contributions have followed whatever I was working on or running into. Some highlights:

• Tailscale — added routing support for Ubiquiti UniFi UDM-Pro devices, which affected me directly and apparently a lot of other people
• Pants — module mappings for third-party libraries and workunit logging improvements
• Netdata — RPM packaging, EL6/EL7 support, and a handful of monitoring fixes back when I was running a lot of self-hosted infrastructure
• Buildkite Test Collector — fixed a JSON corruption race condition that showed up when multiple pytest processes tried to merge results concurrently
• Coder — fixed a concurrent OAuth token refresh race condition that could cause cache poisoning with single-use refresh tokens

The pattern is pretty consistent: I hit something broken or missing, fix it, and send it upstream. It’s a good habit.

This site

I built this site to sharpen my writing and share technical things I run into that might be useful to others. Sometimes that means going deep on a specific problem; sometimes it means writing something up the way I wish I’d found it when I was searching.