Chris Hoge
Developer Relations and Open Source Community Management

Open source developer advocate and community manager with over ten years of experience in building infrastructure and AI communities, with a focus on:

Modular
Developer Relations Manager
January 2024 - Present

Managing the Developer Advocacy team, including AI Developer Advocates and a Community Manager, supporting Modular's mission to reinvent how AI is developed and deployed with MAX, a next-generation developer platform, and Mojo, a new programming language designed for portable, high-performance computation on CPU and GPUs, including Nvidia accerators. Accomplishments include:

  • Managing community marketing and outreach, publishing more than 45 articles covering six major product launches, company announcements, and technical developer content.
  • Strategic planning for MAX Builds, a community-driven package discovery and distribution site based on open source standards. This long-term initiative required releasing a new package manager and building a community-supported distribution channel.
  • Advising company leadership on open source strategy, contributing to the December 2024 public announcement to open source the Mojo programming language by the end of 2026.
Human Signal
Head of Community
October 2022 - January 2024

Lead company efforts to build a community around the open source project Label Studio. This work included managing a team of advocates and technical writers to develop content, support end-users, encourage developer contributions, foster strategic partnerships, and actively participate in industry events. Accomplishments included:

  • Launching an Integrations Directory to highlight ecosystem partnerships, becoming one of the primary drivers for organic Label Studio discovery.
  • Launching an Academic Program to support over 100 universities and research institutions in data labeling efforts.
  • Growing the Label Studio community across all metrics, including monthly active users, GitHub Stars (over 14k to date), and Slack Users (over 10k to date).
  • Managing the production of a complete series of getting-started tutorials to improve the new-user onboarding process.
  • Advising company leadership in launching a new open-source, agent-based data labeling project: Adala.
  • Collaborating with Label Studio engineers to refine internal processes to respond more quickly to community issues, pull requests, and security reports, improving the Label Studio open source contribution process.
OctoML
Principal Developer Advocate for Apache TVM
January 2022 - July 2022

Developed a strategic program focused on expanding the matrix of supported software and hardware platforms. Documented the front-end operators that could be imported into TVM from popular frameworks such as TensorFlow, PyTorch, and ONNX, pairing them with TVM's hardware support matrix, assisting hardware vendors in understanding how TVM could deploy ML models to their next-generation hardware.

Senior Developer Advocate for Apache TVM
July 2020 - December 2021

Senior Developer Advocate for the open source Apache TVM project, a machine learning compiler framework dedicated to expanding the limits of machine learning by allowing users to deploy optimized ML models on any platform, from resource-constrained embedded systems to the latest generation of GPU and TPUs.

Planned and implemented an open source strategy designed to grow and support the user and developer communities. This work covered several dimensions of community management, including:

  • Running and growing a community user conference, TVMCon, doubling the conference's growth year-over-year from 300 to 700 attendees and increasing conference revenue by over 10x.
  • Writing documentation and tutorials, including a complete refactoring of the core documentation to address usability and discoverability. One key impact of this effort was a 20% improvement in user retention.
  • Improving the first-run experience for users by building Python packages for TVM. This packaging allowed users to install the TVM framework on Linux without compiling it.
  • Shepherding a new RFC process as a first step to improving the community roadmap process. To date, 50 new RFCs have been submitted through this process, with 50% accepted for implementation.
  • Deploying a metrics platform to measure community health across various publicly available sources.
  • Running monthly developer meetings and establishing a community calendar that encouraged TVM sub-projects to schedule and run their own community events.
OpenStack Foundation
Senior Strategic Program Manager
January 2017 - August 2019

Community advocate and developer supporting the strategic goals of the OpenStack Foundation. Focused on expanding the reach and scope of the OpenStack community across two major areas: building OpenStack integrations into Kubernetes and expanding the OpenStack Foundation to include new projects.

Work in the Kubernetes community included:

  • Co-leading SIG-OpenStack and coordinating development efforts across both the OpenStack and Kubernetes communities. Working with SIG-Testing and CNCF/CICD on reporting e2e and conformance testing results on OpenStack clouds.
  • Co-founding and co-leading SIG-Cloud-Provider, advocating for all cloud providers and helping to transition all providers to using external cloud-provider interfaces with a primary goal of removing all in-tree cloud-provider code from the Kubernetes code-base.
  • Leading community development sessions at OpenStack Summits and KubeCon.
  • Speaking at community conferences, including KubeCon.

Expanded the OpenStack (now OpenInfra) Foundation's project scope by managing projects focused on container orchestration. This included:

  • Acting as the official OpenStack Foundation liaison to the Airship Project, an open-source project designed to automate the entire life-cycle of large-scale data centers through the combination of OpenStack and Kubernetes.
  • Serving as the co-founder and Project Team Lead (PTL) on the OpenStack Loci project, a system for building optimized Docker containers for deploying OpenStack services.
  • Assisting in promoting Kata Containers, a secure, virtualized container runtime, at industry events, including KubeCon and DockerCon.
  • Writing a whitepaper on Leveraging Containers and OpenStack.
Interoperability Engineer
September 2014 - December 2018

Assisted companies in the OpenStack ecosystem to productively engage as part of the community, both upstream as part of the development process and downstream, as they turned OpenStack code into products and services, with the overall goal of improving interoperability. Guided the launch of the OpenStack Powered Trademark Program, which used community-developed tests to guarantee interoperability between commercial OpenStack clouds. Defined required capabilities, identified tests to measure those capabilities, updated the tests to work in public and private cloud environments, and produced the interoperability standard guidelines. Administered the technical aspects of the OpenStack Powered program and served as Project Technical Lead (PTL) for the RefStack project, an interoperability test-harness and reporting tool.

Technical lead on the launch of the OpenStack Certified Administrator exam. Drawing from questions written by a community panel, edited the exam for consistency of content and voice, worked with third-party contractors to implement the exam, and did quality assurance on the initial launch and subsequent updates.

Puppet Labs
Senior Software Engineer - OpenStack
June 2013 - August 2014

Worked as a software developer and community liaison between the Puppet and OpenStack communities. Was the Project Technical Lead (PTL) for the puppet-openstack modules. Was responsible for testing, release management, and project guidance, including developing shared tools and libraries to reduce code duplication in the puppet-openstack modules. Advocated for creating a new track at the OpenStack summits to give open source projects adjacent to the OpenStack community collaboration and development space. Supported the marketing team in promoting Puppet at industry events.

University of Oregon
Research Software Engineer
July 2008 - May 2013

ACISS project technical lead. Responsible for acquiring and administering a $2 million research cloud computer for the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Oregon. For over three years, ACISS supported over forty research projects. Taught courses in cloud computing and delivered several talks on using OpenStack for scientific computing at conferences, including OSCON. Expertise in OpenStack, scientific cloud computing, research workflows, and data warehousing. Activities also included supporting research in brain imaging for diagnosis and treatment of traumatic brain injury. Worked in C++, Java, Python, and Clojure.

Stereotaxis
Senior Software Engineer
June 2007 - June 2008

Worked with a team of developers to produce a software interface for a magnetically guided catheter heart and vascular surgery platform. Responsible for:

  • Automating functions for creating 3-D maps of hearts.
  • Writing a novel algorithm for building 3-D models of the vascular system from stereo images.
  • Building a dynamic window layout engine.
  • Writing a core system-level library for safely loading and unloading dynamic plugin modules.

University of Oregon
Research Programmer, Neuroinformatics Center
May 2005 - May 2007

Developed high-performance signal process algorithms for analyzing dense-array EEG data in C++ with MPI and OpenMP. Created a template-based MPI data library to serialize objects automatically and optimally. Implemented a test framework to validate the correctness of MPI instrumentation libraries, helping to guarantee that automated instrumentation libraries did not lose or corrupt data.

Research Programmer, Computational Intelligence Research Lab
April 2003 - May 2005

Implemented machine learning algorithms focusing on satisfiability-proof solvers, search, and ad-hoc routing heuristics. Worked on applying AI principles to network graph data structures. Developed primarily in C++, with prototyping using Matlab and Python.

Efeckta Technologies
Lead Software Engineer
September 2000 - January 2003

Lead developer on the implementation of wavelet-based machine learning and classification algorithms. Using multi-dimensional wavelet decomposition on training sets, the algorithms generated fingerprints that were then used to identify features in medical images and mass spectroscopy samples. Implemented high-performance algorithms using C++, with compile-time optimizations written using template meta-programming.

Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory
Associate Mathematician
August 1999 - September 2000

Mathematician, with primary work in supporting the development of simulations in C++ and Matlab. Research areas included modeling electromagnetics, solving equations of motion, and stochastic signal processing.

University of Colorado at Boulder
M.S. Applied Mathematics

Applied Math degree with an interdisciplinary collaboration in biomechanics. Focus on computational solutions of differential equations related to physical processes, fluid dynamics, and biomechanics. Masters Thesis: "A Model for Integrating the Internal and External Mechanics of a Soft-Bodied Anguilliform Swimmer"

Washington University in St. Louis
B.S. Systems Science and Mathematics

Applied Math degree with a focus on optimization and control systems. Minors in Computer Science and Philosophy, with additional work on artificial intelligence and logic.