Introduction

My name is Demetrios Dimatos, I have been an engineer for over 15 years. Although I have a passion for engineering, I enjoy working in my shop where you might find me restoring furniture, installing flooring, plumbing and even gardening. I enjoy being outdoors riding my bike and hiking.

Professional Experience

Current

Currently I work for IBM where I am the Ansible Core Senior Technical Lead, leading the Ansible z/OS Core collection and influencing z/OS Open Automation Utilities and other offerings. The z/OS Core collection is our solution to enable a modern devOps experience on the mainframe.

Yup, I did say mainframe; I enjoy all tech and when it really comes down to it, when on the mainframe I am usually in a UNIX environment working on Ansible and the last time I checked, our collection had nearly 100,000 downloads.

Initially, I designed the collection and unified all the z/OS collections under one site where I developed the tooling and templates that format the documentation so users could experience all the collections as if they were a single offering. Not long after, I decided this was not enough and wanted to give our users playbooks they could run thus I came up with the playbook repository where we offer simple to advanced playbooks.

As a lead, I always try to maintain 30% - 40% non-blocking development, somehow it always ends up being more but my belief has always been to never to ask anything of anyone I won’t do.

I am responsible for:

Basically I am an engineer are heart who leads, develops and is the scrum master for the Ansible offering on the mainframe.

Prior

I was not always into devOps, prior to this role I had led and designed several other products. I led a team which designed the Spark engine integration into a legacy ETL offering that also included parsing the UI operations and generating scala to run on Spark to perform the transformations.

I was the lead for HDFS, YARN and MapReduce for IOP (IBM Open Platforms). My team spanned multiple timezones and we would work on community JIRAs when we wer not supporting customers.

I also had led a full stack offering that I had designed to administer a proprietary NoSQL database. Since the design allowed for partners to extend it, it had to be extremely flexible in that even a button for different partners could perform their designated operation through a registry.

Other projects I worked on include REST APIs, middleware and kernel development.