About me

I'm John Costa, a principal cloud engineer at HPE, where I work on Morpheus, the hybrid cloud management platform. I'm based in Oakland, California.

Before HPE I spent ten years at ExecOnline, from 2016 to 2026. I started as a software engineer on the video pipeline and the enterprise portal, then moved into site reliability and led most of the team's code review while it grew from 9 to 25 developers. That work became a code review canon and a tech lead role, and later the titles Associate Director and Senior Director of Engineering. I wrote production code the whole way through.

I studied philosophy at the University of Vermont. My first lines of code were JavaScript macros in Photoshop, and a General Assembly course turned that into a career.

I'm a generalist by nature. I've shipped production code in TypeScript, Ruby, Python, Go, and Rust. I've built frontends in React, backends in Rails and Node, and infrastructure on AWS and Cloudflare. I care less about the stack and more about whether the thing we're building actually solves the problem. At every company I've worked at, I've ended up crossing into product and design because I think the best engineers understand what they're building and why.

I have more than 350 merged pull requests in open source projects I don't maintain, including Homebrew, Home Assistant, and Super Productivity. I'm the second-largest contributor to Ink, the React renderer that runs underneath Claude Code, Gemini CLI, and GitHub Copilot CLI. I contribute because I use these tools and want them to be better.

I also build my own tools. oss-autopilot is a Claude Code plugin for open source contribution. fleetview is a terminal roster for coding agents. rbcop is RuboCop rewritten in Rust. The rest are on npm and GitHub.

Outside work I'm focused on AI-assisted development: using agents to work across more of the stack at higher quality. Design, product thinking, and engineering are converging, and I want to be at that intersection.

New here? Start with How to Become a Top Contributor to an Open Source Project, The Era of Rust Rewrites, or Why AI-Assisted Development Feels Like Engineering Management. Everything else is on the writing page.

The now page has what I'm working on this month, and testimonials has what colleagues have said. I'm on LinkedIn, and the contact page is the best way to reach me.