Professional

My name is Ben Larson. I work at the University of Minnesota in our central IT department (OIT), I am in the infrastructure area and devote my time to bringing automation, testability, and transparency to our infrastructure deployments. I work hard to try and involve our AppDev and departmental developers more in the infrastructure creation process so that it can be more useful out of the box and there is less time spent in re-work of the platform.

I am an active participant in the local DevOps community and hope to contribute back soon by giving some talks and sharing the knowledge I’ve gained along my journey, this blog is a first step towards that.

I work with an incredibly broad array of tools and can (and do) traverse up and down the stack fluently. I particularly enjoy working with other motivated technical people to figure out what’s coming next and how to fit all the various tools and processes together to form a complete system for infrastructure delivery and management.

Personal

I live in the Twin Cities area of Minnesota, but spend as much time as I can in and around the Rocky Mountains of Colorado.

I am passionate about a wide variety of sports that loosely coalesce around two wheels:

  • Mountain Biking
    • All Mountain
    • Downhill
    • XC (Cross Country)
  • Road Bicycling
    • Light touring
    • Commuting
    • Grand Fondo
  • Motorcycles
    • Street
    • Track
    • Dirt
    • Dual Sport / ADV