Simon Plourde is a Sensei

Introducing Simon Plourde, Engineer

It is with great pleasure that am able to formally introduce Simon Plourde as employee #8 at Sensu, Inc.––our first hire following the VC investment, and our newest Engineer!

Most of you will know Simon as the author of the Uchiwa dashboard project, and one of the friendliest faces around the various conference circuits he likes to participate in, including Monitorama. We have been working with Simon for just over two years as a subcontracting consultant, during which time he has allowed us to provide input on improvements to Uchiwa, and collaborate on support for new/upcoming features in Sensu Core.

In 2015 we worked closely with Simon to refactor Uchiwa to enable an open core model similar to Sensu’s, such that it can facilitate the development of added-value extensions such as Role Based Access Controls and other Enterprise-only features that have become an integral part of the Sensu Enterprise value-proposition. These efforts have helped us promote Uchiwa from a community project, to become the official dashboard of the open source Sensu project, all the while improving the experience for Sensu Core users.

About Simon

Simon lives in Montreal, Quebec, where he enjoys cycling on his road bike, and skiing, among other hobbies. When he’s not traveling the world, he can frequently be found at one of the local ski hills in Montreal (Mont Saint-Sauveur), which is known for its world-class night skiing and boasts one of the longest ski seasons in Quebec of over 160-days per year! ⛷

Professionally, Simon’s background in tech began at a Canadian ISP called iWeb, where he was first exposed to the world of operations at scale. From there he had an opportunity to work in operations at La Presse, one of Canada’s largest newspaper outlets, with a sizable online presence. Simon worked on the team behind their mobile apps, which eventually became the white-labeled daily news platform called Nuglif. It was at La Presse that Simon was first exposed to Sensu, which was already in use when he arrived. Simon promptly observed that there wasn’t a good dashboard solution available for displaying monitoring data from multiple Sensu backends (e.g. from disparate physical or logical data centers), and so he began a weekend hack project that eventually became Uchiwa. The first commit to the Uchiwa project happened on February 21, 2014, based on Sensu Core version 0.12.x – early days! Thankfully he was encouraged to open source his work under the friendly MIT license, and so it became publicly available soon after it was deployed into production use at La Presse.

Why we’re excited about working with Simon

Simon’s arrival at Sensu is a major milestone for the company and project, as it marks the first time in Sensu’s history that there will be a full time employee working on Sensu frontends. As an aside, it’s almost ironic that Sensu Enterprise – an enterprise monitoring product – has been able to achieve the traction that it has in large enterprise organizations without even a single dedicated engineer working on frontend development (!). We’re very excited about the work Simon and the rest of our growing frontend development team will do for the future of the Sensu project and community.

Welcome, Simon!

#monitoringlove