When Miguel took me on a trail run to Twin Peaks in San Francisco, little did I know that ten years later, I would be joining him at Chainloop. I remember almost dying that day, but finally, we reached the top. I know I would not have done it without him. That was neither the first nor the last time he proved himself a fantastic fellow. On that day, I realized that we make a great team together.
Miguel and I have been teaming up at Bitnami and VMware, building great products and applications for over a decade. Out of all the professionals I know, he is definitely one of the few I trust the most. It's not just because of his experience or intellect but also because he is an exceptional builder and an unstoppable executor who always delivers.
At Bitnami, we were part of a small special forces squad, the core founding team. We tackled the challenges of building a Software Supply Chain at scale. We created automation, allowing us to deliver hundreds of Open Source applications (any app, any format, any platform) in hours. That was essential to provide updated cloud images quickly in case of critical security issues such as Heartbleed or Log4Shell. All applications were continuously validated across many platforms: AWS, Azure, GCP, Kubernetes, and more.
We also developed many cloud services for the hyperscalers. We used that opportunity and challenged ourselves to solve numerous fascinating problems, including storing customers' cloud credentials securely, and building background job processing or long-running agents. Our experience creating Kubeapps, taught us how to make a great developer experience for Kubernetes, enabling our users to easily consume Open Source applications in cloud-native environments.
Later on at VMware, we started working on the Application Catalog, which we internally called “Bitnami for the Enterprise”. A library of trusted Open Source building blocks built to your spec, continuously updated, validated, and provided with provenance data directly to your registry. I led the product team while Miguel supported the engineering one. We worked closely with customers in highly regulated industries - we learned a ton from them. Our collaboration added a few essential features, such as our own format for Software Build of Materials SBOM (way before SBOM became a thing), provenance & attestation files for container images and Helm Charts, all signed and delivered to your OCI registry.
Over all these years, collaborations, and projects, we have demonstrated working well together. That is the main reason why I joined Chainloop. Add on top of that our experience in Software Supply Chain Security, which has prepared us well for this new challenge, and the exciting opportunity to work on a new, unexplored idea, an Open Source project so close to my heart - loved by developers and trusted by ops. That all makes me thrilled to be part of the team that will take Chainloop to the next level.
