Meet the latest OpenShift Superheroes

This week at Red Hat OpenShift Commons in London we had the chance to recognize a few OpenShift Superheroes. While each member of the OpenShift community is a hero, helping contribute to the project’s success and growth, some members really stand out. These contributors are the advocates and champions that make the community strong and successful.

OpenShift Superheroes are made up of:

• Builders: contributing to the evolution of OpenShift
• Advocates: amplifying their OpenShift experience and learnings through events, blogs, meetups and more.
• Ambassadors: shares knowledge across diverse teams, industries, organizations

Here’s a look at who we recognized in London for helping to advance the community through their contributions, participation and innovation:  

Jef Luyckx - Piros
The Advocate
“Jef is the ultimate Red Hat OpenShift guru—if there were an OpenShift Hall of Fame, he’d have a lifetime membership. His journey began with OpenShift 3.0, and ever since, he’s worked with every version, mastering them like a true Kubernetes wizard. You’ll always find him at Red Hat’s OpenShift User Group events, probably in the front row, ready to dive into deep discussions about containers, operators, and the latest OpenShift innovations. No OpenShift challenge is too big for him—he thrives on them. Rumor has it, Jef literally breathes OpenShift. If you ever wonder why he sleeps so well at night, it's probably because there’s an OpenShift cluster humming peacefully under his bed.”

Joris Cramwinckel - Ortec Finance
The Ambassador
“Joris and Ortec Finance are frontrunners when it comes to the adoption of Red Hat technology. They continuously jump on new technologies like OpenShift AI immediately when it becomes available, experimenting where and how it might add value to accelerating the achievement of positive business outcomes.”

Loïc Mulder - ITS4U
The Ambassador
“Loic is 10 years the OpenShift advocate in Luxembourg, having played a key role in first creating the OCP customer with the sales team then supporting and rescuing numerous OpenShift installations. His efforts have ensured that Red Hat and ITS4U dominate the containerization market in Luxembourg. Beyond his technical impact, Loic is a regular speaker at our events, delivering compelling real-world use cases and stories that resonate with customers and partners alike. He has presented at multiple OpenShift User Groups, Summit Connect, and Voxxed Days, where he subtly but effectively positions OpenShift. Simply put, our success in Luxembourg would not be the same without him.”

Mark de Jong - ING Bank
The Builder
“Mark de Jong is both a builder as well as an ambassador. Both in the open as well as in the background Mark is advocating for OpenShift including actively contributing true edge cases, RFEs, bugs and more. Mark has been a speaker at multiple events including OpenShift Commons and KubeCon. Being a Lead Engineer at ING Bank he is well respected both within the company as well as outside. In my opinion Mark truly contributes to the evolution of OpenShift as well as advocating across the industry as well as within their own organization.”

Mike Whale - Lloyds Banking Group
The Builder
“Mike is an OpenShift advocate with an eye for detail, as well as playing a crucial role in the deployment and architecture of the OpenShift platform at Lloyds Banking Group. As a frequent (and advanced) home lab user, Mike's keen focus on security has led to him discovering and reporting multiple CVE's in the Service Mesh and upstream Istio technology that is part of OpenShift. Further enhancing the security of the OpenShift product as well as the upstream community versions of Istio and Envoy for all community members.”

Nominate today
Know someone who helps the OpenShift community thrive? Nominations are currently open for the next OpenShift Superhero Awards, who will be recognized at our Boston event on May 19.  Act fast, nominations for the Boston event will close on April 6.