About the Author

Curt Sampson started out as a computer hobbyist in the 1980s, programming on machines ranging from an Apple II to a VAX 11/780 running BSD Unix. In the early 90s he became a full-time systems administrator, co-founded an early Internet Service Provider in 1995, and soon started doing software development professionally as well.

In 1999 he joined Blink.com, a startup building a database-driven website for storing bookmarks. (Don't look for it; it's long gone.) Some would consider this company unusual for having a single, combined IT department that handled everything: project management, product design, coding, testing, deployment, IT operations and maintenance. It did this without specialized roles (such as "programmer," "sysadmin", "DBA" or even "project manager") for individuals: although there certainly were people with more knowledge in specific areas, everybody was encouraged to understand and work on every part of the entire system.

At Blink.com he first discovered Kent Beck's book Extreme Programming Explained and started to implement techniques that are now called "agile development." He grew to be a strong devotee of automation for testing, deployment and maintenance at Blink and at most subsequent companies, building sophisticated test and deployment frameworks that often ran near-production configurations on developers' workstations.

The gains in efficiency and reliability from removing the barriers between different IT specialities were quite clear from the start; this idea also eventually blossomed in the Agile movement as "DevOps." Curt has continued to develop a wide array of techniques within such "barrier-free" environments that increase security and reliability at the same time as reducing cost.

As well as the blog posts here, he's also responsible for most of the posts on the Starling Software blog, some of which also cover agile and DevOps techniques.

He can be contacted at cjs@cynic.net.