# Who is … ?

Not quite Twurp’s Peerage but a Who’s Who of the Varnish Cache project.

## Anders Berg

Blame Anders! He is the one who got the crazy idea that the world needed another HTTP proxy server software, and convinced his employer, the norwegian newspaper Verdens Gang to pay for the first version to be developed.

Here is an interview with Anders about how it all began

## Dag-Erling Smørgrav

DES was working at Redpill-Linpro, a norwegian UNIX/Open Source company when Anders floated his idea for a “forward HTTP cache”, he lured PHK into joining, was one of the original developers (doing Linux), project manager and release engineer for the first three years of the project, and forced us to adopt a non-US-ASCII charset from the start.

## Poul-Henning Kamp

PHK, as he’s usually known, has written most of the code and come up with most of the crazy ideas in Varnish, and yet he still has trouble remembering what ‘REST’, ‘CORS’ and ‘ALPN’ means, and he flunked ‘CSS for dummies’ because he was never a webmaster or webdeveloper. He does have 30+ years of experience in systems programming, and that seems useful too.

PHK’s random outbursts has their own section in the Varnish documentation.

## Per Buer

Per also worked at Redpill-Linpro, and at some point when the impedance mismatch between Linpros “normal way of doing things” and the potential of Varnish became to steep, he convinced the company to spin off Varnish Software with himself at the helm.

Do a git blame on the Varnish documentation and you will be surprised to see how much he cares about it. Very few people notice this.

## Ingvar Hagelund

Ingvar works as Team Leader (read very skilled sysadmin) at Redpill-Linpro, but his passion is reading books and blogging about it, as well as RPM packaging. So every Fedora and EPEL (read RedHat and CentOS) Varnish user out there owe him a thanks or two. Once in a while, he also trawls the internet checking for the rate of Varnish adoption among top web sites.

## Stig Sandbeck Mathisen

Stig works at Redpill-Linpro and is the guy in charge of packaging Varnish for Debian, which means Ubuntu users owe him a thanks also. Besides this, he maintains VCL-mode for emacs and is generally a nice and helpful guy.

## Tollef Fog Heen

Tollef was product owner and responsible for Varnish while working for Redpill-Linpro. later tech lead at Varnish Software and held the Varnish release manager helmet for a few years. His experience with open source (Debian, Ubuntu and many others) brought sanity to the project in ways that are hard to measure or describe.

## Kristian Lyngstøl

Kristian was the first Varnish SuperUser, and he quite literally wrote the book, while giving Varnish courses for Redpill-Linpro, and he pushed boundaries where no boundaries had been pushed before which caused a lot of improvements and “aha!” moments in Varnish.

## Artur Bergman

Artur ran Wikias webservers and CDN when he discovered Varnish and eagerly adopted it, causing many bugreports, suggestions, patches and improvements. At some point, he pivoted Wikias CDN into the Varnish based startup-CDN named Fastly

## Kacper Wysocki

Kacper was probably the first VCL long program writer. Combine this with an interest in security and a job at Redpill-Linpro and he turned quickly into the author of security.vcl and, later, the Varnish Security Firewall. He does not have any commits in Varnish and still has managed to drive quite a few changes into the project. Similarly, he has no idea or has even thought about asking for it, and still is being added here He maintains the VCL grammar in BNF notation, which is an unexploited gold mine.

## Nils Goroll

aka ‘slink’ is the founder of UPLEX, a five-head tech / consultancy company with negative to zero marketing (applied for entry into the “Earth’s worst company homepage” competition). He fell in love with Varnish when he migrated Germany’s Verdens Gang counterpart over a weekend in March 2009 and, since then, has experienced countless moments of pure joy and happiness when, after struggling for hours, he finally understood another piece of beautiful, ingenious Varnish code.

Nils’ primary focus are his clients and their projects. He tries to make those improvements to Varnish which matter to them.

## Martin Blix Grydeland

Martin was the first full-time member of the C-team at Varnish Software. He is the main responsible for the amazing revamp of the logging facilities and utilities in the 4.0 cycle and later the storage rework. Besides that he fixes lots of bugs, knows varnishtest better than most, writes vmods and is the Varnish Cache Plus architect.

## Lasse Karstensen

Lasse is the current release manager and stable version maintainer of Varnish Cache. When not doing that, he maintains build infrastructure and runs the Varnish Software C developer team in Oslo.

## Geoff Simmons

Geoff started working at UPLEX in 2010 and soon learned to love Varnish as much as slink does. Since then he’s been contributing code to the project, writing up various VMODs (mostly about regular expressions, blobs, backends and directors), developing standalone applications for logging that use Martin’s VSL API, and adding custom patches to Varnish for various customer needs. He spends most of his days in customer projects as “the Varnish guy” on the operations teams.