Meet the Team

Cedric Hurst is Principal and founder at Spantree. He spends a lot of time thinking about how to apply cutting-edge open source solutions to business and everyday problems. Before starting Spantree, he had a stint at IBM as an open source evangelist. He also founded a startup to create secure wireless networks in the early 2000s. He loves working with Groovy, Elasticsearch, rules engines, and devops tools. In his spare time, Cedric also speaks at technical meetups, makes music and mentors students. If he wasn't building software for a living, his fallback career is to become a record store clerk.

Eli is a full-stack developer at Spantree specializing on the front end. Since joining Spantree he’s learned of a passion for effective data handling via GraphQL. When he’s not working, you’re likely to find Eli baking, dancing, camping, or learning guitar at Old Town School of Folk Music.

Gary is a seasoned software architect and generalist. Over the years, he's worked with many companies to create new products and improve their operations. From running Mesos clusters, to high traffic web APIs, to machine learning projects. He's done it all and been on-call. He loves working towards ambitious goals and lofty ideals, and he always roots for the underdog.

Off the clock, he likes to cook, watch tech talks, and spend time with his family.

Jon has many years of experience in technology ranging from systems administration to network engineering to software engineering and project management. While a generalist at heart, he has a keen eye for detail. Jon has a passion for making technology work for people rather than the other way around.

Jon has more interests than hairs on his head and has always been curious about how things work. When not in front of a computer, Jon enjoys creating things out of wood and playing guitar. He is also a pretty decent cook and enjoys preparing, talking about and, especially, eating food.

Kyle's been interested in technology since just before he accidentally erased the family computer while trying to install Slackware Linux. His family was very understanding about that -- the first time. His professional career began with a focus on web application development, but has since returned to his roots of getting frustrated with Unix while maintaining distributed systems.

Outside of work, Kyle is likely to be seen biking along the lakeshore and struggling to teach his old dogs new tricks.

As Spantree's Director of Operations, Liz ensures our engineers have the ideal environment in which to innovate for our clients, and that our clients have a seamless experience while working with Spantree. Liz joins Spantree from the Chicago office of the Network for Teaching Entrepreneurship (NFTE), an international nonprofit that engages young people in school by teaching them the fundamentals of business and entrepreneurship. In her free time, Liz enjoys cooking, binge watching the latest Netflix original series, and finding the best bowl of ramen in Chicago (follow along on ramenadventure.tumblr.com).

Marija is a developer hailing from an electrical engineering education. She became determined to pursue a career in software after a sleepless finals week spent designing a calculator using transistors - it was never more apparent there are faster ways to accomplish things. Marija is passionate about continued learning and working on projects that have positive impacts.

She currently spends most of her time building application backends - and especially enjoys leveraging serverless computing tools and a functional style of programming. In her free time, you may find her at the nearest climbing gym or planning her next outdoorsy adventure.

Roberto Guerra is a developer living in the Caribbean.

In his spare time, he likes to read fantasy books and goof around with his dogs. He also started learning to play the classical guitar late in life. His current tech interests are Go, serverless and MacOS development with Swift.

Ryan is a software developer coming from a non-traditional background and a wide area of interests. His passion for languages, learning, and music production have more recently merged with another life-long interest: computers and programming.

Ryan's primary focus is full-stack JavaScript, but he is broadening his horizons by delving further into backend and cloud development. When not working, he is spending time with his family, working in his home studio, reading, cooking, and/or traveling.

Sebastian Otaegui is a system admin currently living in Buenos Aires. He started his career working as one of the web hosting administrators in the eBusiness hosting team at IBM, soon he got tired of the red tape that big organizations suffer. After working for one year for a very large extended warranty company, he was asked to move to Chicago to work as the team leader for the web hosting administration team. During the six years working at The Warranty Group he met Cedric. Sebastian and Cedric became friends and begun introducing concepts that back then didn't have a name and today are known as DevOps practices.

In his free time, Sebastian enjoys trying new technologies, watching movies with his wife and playing Star Wars The Old Republic. Fun fact about Sebastian is he played rugby for 14 years.