Jesse Robbins

Jesse Robbins
Born	1978 (age 38)[1] Manchester-by-the-Sea, Massachusetts[2]
Residence	Seattle, WA[1]
Education	Mission College Firefighter Academy [2]
Occupation	Founder of Orion Labs[3][4] & Chef[1]
Known for	Contributions to computer science, web operations/DevOps, & emergency management [1]

Jesse Robbins (born 1978) is an American technology entrepreneur and firefighter ^[5][6] notable for his contributions in wearable communication, web operations, DevOps,^{[7][8][9][10]} and emergency management.^[11][12][13]

Career

Contributions to web operations and devops

Robbins worked at Amazon.com with the title of “Master of Disaster” where he was responsible for website availability for every property bearing the Amazon brand. He created "GameDay", a project to increase reliability by purposefully creating major failures on a regular basis. Robbins has said GameDay was inspired by his experience & training as a firefighter combined with lessons from other industries and research on complex systems, human cognitive stress models, reliability engineering, and normal accidents. Game day and similar approaches are considered a best practice for large technology companies.^[12]

After Amazon, Robbins founded the Velocity Conference to advance the field of Web Operations & DevOps. He also founded Chef a cloud infrastructure automation company. Robbins left his full time role with the company in 2013 to start a new company, but remains an advisor.^[14]

Robbins was recognized in 2011 with the Technology Review TR35 award for "transforming the way Web companies design and manage complex networks of servers and software" at Amazon.com, founding the Velocity Web Performance & Operations Conference, and founding Chef and serving as the first CEO.^{[1][15][16][17][18]}

Contributions to disaster response & humanitarian aid

Robbins volunteered as “Task Force Leader” in Hurricane Katrina. After he returned, he worked with Mikel Maron and OpenStreetMap on techniques and patterns to improve technology adoption in disaster response & humanitarian aid. These improvements were adopted by the United Nations Joint Logistics Centre in response to Cyclone Nargis in 2008 and are now widely adopted. One example was CrisisCommons in response to the 2010 Haiti earthquake.^[5][6][19]

Current work at Orion Labs

Robbins is founder & CEO of Orion Labs, a startup which has created a "Real-Life Star Trek Communicator" called "Onyx". He says he "wanted to bring heads-up, real-time communication to everybody" to build "a world powered by voice".^[20][21]

Awards and recognition

2012 - Robbins was named as a Top 10 Cloud Computing Leader of 2012 by TechTarget^[22]

2011 - Robbins was selected by Technology Review magazine as one of the top "35 under 35" TR35 innovators in for his work building fault-tolerant online infrastructure at Amazon.com and at Chef.^[1]

2010 - Robbins was selected by Business Journal as one of the top "40 under 40" entrepreneurs in 2010 for founding Chef and raising $13 million in venture capital funding.^[2][15]

Robbins was recognized in 2011 with the Technology Review TR35 award for "transforming the way Web companies design and manage complex networks of servers and software"^[1] at Amazon.com, founding the Velocity Web Performance & Operations Conference, and founding Chef and serving as the first CEO.^{[15][16][17][18]}

References

1. "Technology Review TR35 Profile: Jesse Robbins". Retrieved 2011-12-14.
2. "2010 40 UNDER 40 JESSE ROBBINS". Retrieved 2011-12-14.
3. Fox, Pimm (5 Feb 2015). "Orion Labs Creates Real-Life Star Trek Communicator". Bloomberg. BloombergBusiness. Retrieved 4 April 2015.
4. Metz, Cade (21 January 2015). "'Star Trek Communicator Startup' Sets Out to Build a World Powered by Voice". Wired. Retrieved 12 March 2015.
5. Ginsburg, Janet (7 July 2008). "The Do-Good Imperative". Businessweek. Retrieved 20 December 2011.
6. King, Rachael (7 July 2008). "Making Maps Work When Disaster Strikes". Businessweek. Retrieved 20 December 2011.
7. Logan, Martin. "DevOps Culture Hacks talk from Jesse Robbins". DevOps.com. Retrieved 13 Feb 2012.
8. Brumleve, Harry (17 Jan 2013). "The Rise of DevOps with Jesse Robbins". InfoQ. Retrieved 29 May 2013.
9. Edwards, Damon; Willis, John (20 Sep 2011). "DevOps Cafe Episode 19". DevOpsCafe. Archived from the original on 20 September 2011. Retrieved 29 May 2013.
10. Taylor, Colleen (23 June 2011). "DevOps eliminates knee-jerk no’s at the IT level". GigaOm. Retrieved 13 Aug 2011.
11. O'Reilly, Tim (17 June 2013). "Why We Started the Velocity Conference". O'Reilly Radar. Retrieved 24 June 2013.
12. Jesse Robbins; Kripa Krishnan; John Allspaw; Tom Limoncelli (12 September 2012). "Resilience Engineering: Learning to Embrace Failure". ACM Queue.
13. John Allspaw; Jesse Robbins; Allspaw, John (2010). Web operations : keeping the data on time (1st ed.). Beijing: O'Reilly. p. 336. ISBN 978-1-4493-7744-1.
14. Asay, Matt (5 November 2015). "Building Your Own Cloud Is "Table Stakes," Says Former AWS Engineer". ReadWrite. Retrieved 7 November 2015.
15. John, Cook (16 September 2010). "Fourteen local techies under 40, and the cool stuff they've done". Puget Sound Business Journal - Techflash. Retrieved 20 December 2011.
16. Mets, Cade (26 October 2011). "The Chef, the Puppet, and the Sexy IT Admin". Wired Magazine. Retrieved 20 December 2011.
17. Vance, Ashlee (1 September 2011). "Puppet, Chef Ease Transition to Cloud Computing". Businessweek. Retrieved 20 December 2011.
18. John, Cook (9 August 2011). "Ex-Avanade boss Mitch Hill jumps back into the startup world, joins Opscode as CEO". Geekwire. Retrieved 20 December 2011.
19. Turner, Andrew. "CrisisCommons and Congress". Retrieved 29 January 2015.
20. Fox, Pimm (6 Feb 2015). "Orion Labs Creates Real-Life Star Trek Communicator". Bloomberg Television. Retrieved 3 Mar 2015.
21. Gruber, Ben (29 Apr 2015). "Hands free talk with global reach and style". Thomson Reuters. Reuters. Retrieved 4 June 2015.
22. "Top 10 cloud computing leaders in 2012". 20 March 2012.