Kelsey Hightower 💥
What a fantastic profile of Kelsey Hightower in Protocol last week. Hightower is a Principal Engineer at Google Cloud, and he was one of the key contributors to Kubernetes. He literally wrote the book on Kubernetes with Brendan Burns and Joe Beda, two of the Kubernetes cofounders.
While Hightower is “a legend inside the world of cloud tech” today, he actually started his career as a DSL installation tech in Atlanta. One memory from that job was a well-known architect and city planner telling Hightower a Black person had never stepped foot inside his house before, but “you’re the only person that can give me this technology right now, so I’m going to put all that aside, because you have something I don’t.”
From that point onwards, Hightower decided that technology was an empowering skill that he wanted to develop, and he went on to get a jobs as a systems administrator, a customer-facing software engineer, an early startup employee, and eventually a Google employee building Kubernetes.
He has had an incredible journey, and the full story is 100x better than this one paragraph summary, so please go read it!