// About

A Linux nerd who never grew out of it.

I'm Brian. I write Go, I build operating systems, and I've spent thirty-some years convinced that the computer should work the way I think — not the other way around.

These days I manage engineers at Microsoft. Before that I was a cloud advocate, a CIO, a conference founder, and a co-author. The common thread is open source and a stubborn belief that systems should be legible. If you can't reason about it, you don't own it.

Brian Ketelsen
// The long arc
2026
Engineering Manager at Microsoft. Contributing to upstream Linux distributions; maintaining Snow Linux on the side.
2017
Joined Microsoft as a Cloud Developer Advocate. Go, Kubernetes, and a lot of airports.
2015
Co-authored "Go in Action" (Manning).
2014
Co-founded GopherCon. The first one ran in Denver that April.
2010
Fell hard for a young language called Go.
1993
First Linux install. The root has been mine ever since.
// the ghola clause

My favorite character is Duncan Idaho — killed, resurrected, and brought back across thousands of years. I relate. Every side project I've ever "finished" eventually comes back.