Alex Flom

Personal

I live in Fort Collins, Colorado with my partner, three children, two dogs, and a snake. If I’m not working or participating in open source, I’m probably outside with my family.

I’m an abstract thinker and a systems thinker. I draw inspiration for software engineering from all aspects of life. I’m particularly interested in the intersection of information systems and metaphysics.

Professional Background

I started out my professional career as an Information Systems Technician in the US Navy. During my 11 year tenure with the Navy, I developed information systems curriculums, designed virtual systems administration training environments, administered deployed information systems, designed and deployed streaming surveillance systems for low bandwidth environments, led large disbursed teams, and managed tens of millions of dollars of deployed equipment.

After my time in the Navy, I worked as an automation engineer for various government contractors, which quickly morphed into designing air-gapped cloud native systems that focused on state management. It was around this time that I was hired by Red Hat to develop a solution for managing Red Hat OpenShift in air-gapped environments.

That initiative became oc-mirror, of which my contribution was in the design of its state machine. Notably, oc-mirror manages the state of a container image registry (to include delete operations) that it can never see.

During oc-mirror development, I set out to address the issue of managing non-OCI software artifacts that were frequently referenced as part of OpenShift/Kubernetes Operator dependencies. This is when I created Universal Object Reference (UOR), which establishes resource management in a data defined system.

I now work at Red Hat as a Prodsec Engineer, where I focus on Continuous Compliance data engineering, automation, and tooling development.

Open Source

• CNCF TAG App Delivery’s Artifacts Working Group co-chair.
• Emporous Maintainer
• trestle-bot Maintainer
• Enterprise Neurosystem Member