Jason DuMars

Jason DuMars loves operations. While other technical disciplines are amazing in their own right, his heart will always belong to the scruffy sysadmins, the DBAs, the analytics wranglers, network engineers and security teams. It’s a group of wildly diverse technologists whose days, nights and sometimes weekends are abruptly interrupted by text messages reading: “HOST UNREACHABLE” or “HIGH LOAD WARNING”. Operations engineers of all stripes are the glue that holds everything together. For Jason, my highest aspiration is to be a servant leader for my tribe. He has been a *nix systems administrator since 1993, and long before that held the title of SysOp on various BBS systems. In the fourth grade, he hacked the source code of the Oregon Trail game on an Apple II Plus, and other classmates might have “died of poo” instead of “starvation” as originally intended by the game’s authors. Professionally, Jason has intentionally divided his career between being a sysadmin and managing technology groups because things change rapidly in our world and he feels technical currency is critical to being a credible leader. He loves to learn, and part of the excitement of making operations better is surveying a landscape that is always evolving to solve problems in a new way. Technologies like Docker, Riak, or Ansible appear on the sidelines and suddenly change everything. Another aspect he loves about operations is the rich history of how people and organizations have striven to make the act of product and service delivery better and more efficient. Managing operations is an art. It has literally changed the world. In Jason’s current position as Director of Operations for Rally Software, he is passionately leading the effort to create and implement a truly Agile operations group, as well as helping define an enterprise-scaled version of DevOps that can be leveraged by other organizations.