James Dobson

Background

About James Dobson

At heart, I’m a toolsmith. My passion is building tools that make life easier for other developers and reduce toil for operations. I started my career on a team that was building a model-driven engineering platform. This framework had its own object model, ORM, scripting language, integration engine, etc. I got to do super-cool things like build integration adapters that participated in XA distributed transactions. But something was missing: setup of a production-like system was difficult and took a long time. When I embraced infrastructure as code and the cloud more generally, not only did those hard things get easier, but the set of tools I had to solve any given problem expanded dramatically. It allowed a more holistic approach to solving problems, instead of trying to cram the solutions all into the backend server code. In my present role at Guidewire, I'm helping build the second generation of our cloud platform. We get to use cutting edge technologies in the Kubernetes ecosystem like Crossplane, KubeVela, OCM, and vCluster to build a platform that brings joy to developers and operators.