Hello, I’m Mark Hinkle, the new Executive Director of the Node.js Foundation; Ask Me Anything
I am very pleased to be the the new Executive Director of the Node.js Foundation or maybe more appropriately I’ve taken the mask of the Dread Pirate Roberts of the Node.js Foundation. I say this with tongue-in-cheek as I am here to help ensure that Node.js continues to be a healthy, growing ecosystem long after I am long gone.
I am coming to Node.js after serving for the last year as the Vice President of Marketing at The Linux Foundation where I was tasked with promoting The Linux Foundation’s mission to create the world’s largest shared technology collaboration. However, after attending Node.js Interactive in Austin last fall, I was immediately taken by the Node.js community and the passion of the individuals participating in it. I was so impressed by the unbelievable level of accomplishment of the Node.js project and community, I walked out of the conference and immediately called my boss Jim Zemlin, The Linux Foundation’s Executive Director. I told him, “I want to work on this project — it’s an incredible opportunity.”
Luckily for me, I was generously afforded this opportunity.
Don’t let the marketing title fool you. I have spent the last 20 years working in many facets of technology in a variety of roles and capacities both technical and administrative. I am an Apache Software Foundation committer for Apache CloudStack and a member of its PMC.
I’ve also been the VP of Community at Cloud.com (an open source cloud software developer acquired by Citrix). At Citrix, I ran their open source office and sat on the board of the Xen Project and served as a point of contact to the OpenStack Foundation. I also worked at Zenoss (an open source systems management company) where I helped to grow a large open source community.
Previously I worked in virtualization and spent a large part of my career working with Linux desktop technologies, and concurrently I was the Editor-in-Chief of LinuxWorld and Enterprise Open Source magazine. I even wrote a book on Windows to Linux desktop migration.
I started my technical career doing technical support for an ISP and hosting provider. Back then, I helped companies with their corporate websites — some using JavaScript — to help make their web pages more dynamic. I would have never guessed how all of this would evolve into working with Node.js some 20 years later, but I’m excited to begin my next career adventure.
I’d love to talk about all the things I have done (you can see that on LinkedIn if you like), but the bottom line and what has been most rewarding to me is the people I have worked with during my career and the friendships I have made. I think that perhaps this keynote I gave at OSCON in 2013 on creating Communities of Inclusion probably best describes my goals in open source: helping to coordinate people and resources to solve big problems.
I will be working with Node.js Community Manager, Mikeal Rogers, who has done an amazing job with the Node Foundation. In the near term, I will be working with the membership of Node.js to articulate our priorities for the Node.js Foundation for the foreseeable future. In addition, I will be working to help grow an increasingly diverse membership base that includes solution providers, end-users and individuals to help continue Node.js’ great success.
I am also very much looking forward to Node.js Interactive later this year in Vancouver, Canada happening October 4–6. I have been working to line up sponsors and sitting in with the Node.js Interactive events team to help make Node.js Interactive an event that makes as big an impression on others as the last one had on me.
I’d love to meet as many of you as possible. You can find me @mrhinkle on Twitter or via email at mrhinkle@linuxfoundation.org.
