Mitchell Hashimoto, founder of Packer and Vagrant, is back writing about systems

Mitchell Hashimoto was one of the early voices in DevOps. He built Vagrant for reproducible dev environments, Packer for images, Nomad for scheduling, Consul for service discovery, and Terraform for provisioning — all free and open source, all used in production. He sold HashiCorp to VMware in 2021 for about $6.1 billion and stepped away.

Now he's writing again on his own site, posting interviews and essays about infrastructure, distributed systems, and the tradeoffs that keep engineers up at night. The new piece is an interview with Alex Alejandre, who's been running a solo software shop for a decade and writes about shipping real products instead of chasing the next framework. Hashimoto's answers are spare — no hand-waving, no marketing. He talks through what makes systems brittle, why open-source projects are hard to sustain, and how the tooling landscape has shifted since he left.

Why this matters for us: Hashimoto's the kind of builder who actually ships tools that working engineers use every day; his new writing is a window into how that world thinks about infrastructure without the vendor spin.