Fletcher Nichol
Chief Executive Officer at Unicorn Tears Software Corporation
Sherwood Park, Alberta, Canada
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolFletcher Nichol is a seasoned technology leader and engineer with 18 years of experience building resilient, automatable infrastructure and distributed systems from the trenches to the C-suite. As CEO of Unicorn Tears Software Corporation and former Principal Engineer at System Initiative and Chef, he has led product and architecture work spanning packaging systems, service choreography, and robust Windows and Linux automation. A long-time open-source maintainer, Fletcher contributed core improvements to widely used projects like Test Kitchen, Chef Infra, Habitat, and the bento basebox templates, often focusing on testability, build reproducibility, and cross-platform correctness. He combines deep hands-on skills in Rust, Ruby, shell tooling and DevOps practices with a practitioner’s eye for developer experience and reliability. Based in Sherwood Park, Alberta, he brings a rare mix of operator mentality, academic computing-science training, and a track record of turning complex infrastructure problems into maintainable automation.
18 years of coding experience
22 years of employment as a software developer
B.Sc. Specialization in Computing Science Minor in Business B.Sc. Specialization in Computing Science, B.Sc. Specialization in Computing Science Minor in Business B.Sc. Specialization in Computing Science at University of Alberta
English, French
Github Skills (53)
unit-testing10
test-kitchen10
git10
cookbook10
docker10
package-management10
scripting10
testing10
configuration-management10
rspec10
linux10
bash10
chefspec10
containerization10
dockers10
Programming languages (16)
Github contributions (5)
fnichol/chef-user
Aug 2011 - May 2013
A convenient Chef LWRP to manage user accounts and SSH keys
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:116 commits in 1 year 9 months
Contributions summary:Fletcher primarily contributed to the development of a Chef LWRP for managing user accounts. Their work included fixing attributes in the resource, provider and adding functionality for managing SSH authorized keys. They also introduced a recipe for managing data bag accounts and implemented the creation of SSH keypairs. Finally, they modified the attributes, the metadata of the cookbook, and addressed a bug in the keygen implementation.
lwrpssh-keys
sous-chefs/rvm
Oct 2010 - Sep 2013
Development repository for the rvm cookbook
Role in this project:Backend Developer
Backend DeveloperContributions:392 commits in 2 years 11 months
Contributions summary:Fletcher primarily contributed to the development and maintenance of the `rvm` cookbook. Their initial contributions included the creation of recipes for installing specific Ruby versions, setting the default Ruby version, and managing gem installations. Later contributions demonstrate an understanding of conditional package installations based on the Ruby version, and included the addition of a custom gem definition. Further, the user made key changes to support RVM upgrades and improve integration, and developed mechanisms for specifying RVM-specific settings via /etc/rvmrc file.
rvmchefchef-resourcemanaged-by-terraform
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