Jesse Houwing

Netherlands

Over the past 20 years, Jesse has been helping teams make Software Development fun (again). How has changed over time. When he started out it was by teaching techniques and languages, such as Regular Expressions and Object oriented Programming. Then later the focus moved from individual developers to whole teams with Scrum and DevOps. Jesse became a certified trainer for Scrum and Phoenix Project Games. And with the introduction of AI this whole way of working is being disrupted and Jesse has been helping teams deal with that shift. All the while he hasn't just taught people, but has been using the tools and techniques himself to uncover new ways of working and has been chronicling this on his blog, StackOverflow and any other place he's prodded. Where his focus was on ALM, Scrum and DevOps on Azure DevOps in the past, in the past 5 years his focus has almost completely shifted to collaboration on GitHub. Jesse doesn't accept "that's not supported" and has extended Azure DevOps and GitHub in all manner of ways over the years. From maintaining the official Azure DevOps Extension Tasks (recently ported to GitHub) to his collection of specific Actions for authors of GitHub Actions, helping make the GitHub Actions ecosystem safer and better. Over the years he connected to many people in the Azure Pipelines and Actions product teams and Jesse helps shape these product through extensive community feedback. At Xebia, Jesse is the core GitHub Enterprise Administrator and helps shape the usage of the platform for both Xebia and its customers. The Enterprise Administrators are a a small niche group who are faced with interesting challenges who Jesse supports through his own knowledge and experience. Jesse has been awarded the Microsoft Most Valuable Professional Award since 2015 in the Developer Tools and DevOps categories. He uses this status mostly to support and help others grow. Somehow he's one of the most-certified people in the GitHub space at the moment.