Jon

Jon is a capable, detail-oriented engineer,who is passionate about automation that makes systems better and processes more lightweight. Jon's deep knowledge of Git and Jenkins made him an expert contributor upon whom our entire Engineering organization could rely.

Not content to rest on his laurels, Jon pursues new knowledge wherever it may present itself, and in short order was up to his elbows in the guts of Linux infrastructure and the Puppet automation to deploy and manage it.

Finally, Jon maintains a level head and steady hand on the tiller during operational emergencies, which can be a force-multiplier when the team is dealing with customer-facing production issues.

I am so glad I had the opportunity to work with Jon for the past year and a half. His background in QA and passion for high quality code made him an indispensable member of our team. Jon is a Jenkins expert and a Git wizard, and on many occasions he has bailed out the engineering team with his superior version control untangling skills! He always managed to come up with projects that increased our efficiency as a team, such as various improvements to our chat bots in Slack and better streamlining of our automation. I learned so much working with Jon, and he was an incredibly valuable asset to our team.

Jon and I worked together for several years, and he distinguished himself in many ways.

When I first started as a quality engineer at Zipcar, Jon was also a QE, and introduced me to the environment. Without him helping out I wouldn't have been able to get up to speed nearly as fast.

Jon oversaw the nuts and bolts of our release process, and when he got tired of monitoring the increasingly complex system manually, he branched out into writing his own code. He taught himself Ruby scripting and developed a complex system of Jenkins jobs and scripts. Some of these jobs automatically configured the testing and development environments that engineers had been manually configuring every week, which saved everyone a great deal of time and angst. Others automated the weekly process of locking a release candidate, which affected me directly, as I had taken over the process and was getting tired of doing it manually every Friday!

Jon's willingness to take on new challenges on his own initiative solved a lot of problems at Zipcar, and he was always willing to lend a hand when colleagues needed help with the finer points of git or Jenkins. There have already been several occasions in the past week where I've hit a snag and though, "Hmm, I always asked Heckman what to do when I saw errors like this...!"