John O'Duinn

Bio

As software developer, systems architect, director and now founder, John O'Duinn has spent over 23 years designing and helping build release engineering infrastructure that is practical, reliable, cross-platform, scalable and efficient.

Each time, these improvements allowed a range of companies (from startups to multinationals) to ship better software in a more predictable, timely manner and gain a competitive edge in the marketplace. In some cases, these improvements have also become a force multiplier, improving productivity and retention of developers, as well as becoming a new strategically important and profitable revenue stream for the company.

In addition to technology, John loves growing a culture where humans work well together in a distributed global workplace. Almost every company in his career has been distributed in one form or another. The most extreme so far was his team at Mozilla, with 18 people in 14 cities, in 4 non-adjacent timezones, working with Mozilla's globally distributed open source community. He consults and mentors on this topic, and recently agreed to write a book about this for O'Reilly publishers (due early 2016).

John consults and presents at companies, universities and industry conferences around the world. He has an MSc and BSc in Computer Science from Dublin City University, Ireland, co-authored "Firefox Release Engineering" in "The Architecture of Open Source Applications vol2", and blogs on oduinn.com. When not at the keyboard, John practices Aikido, loves travel and is on track to fill his passport again.