Benjamin Goering

1990: born in Topeka, Kansas

2004: started playing with Linux

2005: started first website to blog about Xbox 360s and connect with others. Learned to code as-needed to tweak the design. Briefly podcasted. Loved reading the comments from people all over the world.

2010: dropped out of college after a year to move to San Francisco and join a 4-person startup called Livefyre building real-time comment system for bloggers and, eventually, some of the biggest news/media companies in the world (e.g. CNN, Engadget/AOL, IGN).

2010-2016: Lots of learning to code (first frontend and eventually full-stack), becoming a good teammate, Product Manager, Engineering Manager, both? Eventually I was Product Manager of Platform Products

2016: Livefyre sells to Adobe. I stay for 3 months, then leave to spend 6 months backpacking around Southeast Asia

2017: I come back and start freelancing for various startups and nonprofits incl Mozilla Foundation, hypothes.is, EFF, delmondo.co, fanout.io. Started learning more about cloud infrastructure as code, kubernetes

2018-now: Working on permanent.cloud - a cloud platform for running open source apps without having to code or set up your own server. We want open source apps to be easier to use than proprietary SaaS.

I'm into how to build a business using only open source apps. Is it possible? What projects are missing that would fill the gaps?