About Me

Currently, I spend my days building out teams of humans as well as the systems and tooling to make life better for others. It’s fun, challenging, and it can be a bit of an under-appreciated art. It’s not enough to solve the technical challenges, it’s just as important–if not more so–to address the social ones. Any sufficiently complex system is a sociotechnical one, and so any sufficiently effective solution must be holistic in its approach and not neglect the core idea that–at the end of the day–humans are the ones operating within these systems.

Today, what I strive to do is build things that bring delight and wholeness to others, that they might create ideas of beauty, and build expressions of their soul. I want nothing more than to build a world in which people collaborate with each other, build beautiful creations, take delight in the creations of others, and strive see each other deeply. Happiness, to me, is a world in which people can show up authentically as their whole self and help craft a sense of wholeness in their communities.

I am the resident infrastructure witch of the Hachyderm mastodon instance, and love talking about how we’ve handled some pretty tricky issues without burning out people or servers. I also built the first set of official GitHub actions for the Haskell language and helped maintain that for a while, although I mostly sit on the backburner now as it’s turned into a lovely project and ecosystem in my absence. I aspire to leave myself open for meaningful consulting and advising opportunities, and invest time towards mentoring others. I’ve given talks in a few conferences about my experiences, appeared on quite a few podcasts, and I love sharing what I’ve learned with the world. Lastly (but certainly not least), I currently serve as a Director on the board of the Haskell Foundation and as the first Fellow of the Nivenly Foundation.

I do strongly believe that intersectional advocacy is not only needed, but necessary. To that end, I am continually working to be better at listening, understanding, and holding space for others. I have a focus on underrepresented minorities in tech because that aligns closest with my personal life, but I strive to be an understanding and empathetic advocate in every aspect I can.

When I’m not working or programming, you can find me swing dancing, doing gymnastics, shooting pool, playing board games, playing with makeup, thrift shopping for the perfect dress, drinking coffee, sampling scotch, or playing with my dog, Lupita; I’ve been told I have too many hobbies, so, naturally, I like to add more over time. Research interest wise, I tend to get most into resilience engineering, psychological safety, organizational design, empathetic leadership, systems safety, build systems, distributed systems, programming language theory, type systems, category theory, formal verification, and information geometry. I also read quite a bit, and frequently write about my findings on mastodon, bluesky and my blog.

Currently, I spend my days building out teams of humans as well as the systems and tooling to make life better for others. I’m a fellow of the Nivenly Foundation and a Director of the Haskell Foundation. If I’m not working or programming, I’m probably swing dancing or playing pool! Find me online!

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Hazel spends her days building out teams of humans as well as the systems and tooling to make life better for others. She’s worked at a variety of companies and knows that the hardest problems to solve are the social ones. Hazel currently serves as a Director on the board of the Haskell Foundation, as a Fellow of the Nivenly Foundation, and is fondly known as the Infrastructure Witch of Hachyderm (a popular Mastodon instance). She also created the first official Haskell “setup” Github Action and helped turn it into an active community-maintained project. She enjoys traveling to speak at conferences, appearing on podcasts, mentoring others, and sharing what she’s learned with the world.

One of her favorite things is watching someone light up when they understand something for the first time, and a life goal of hers is to help as many people as possible experience that joy. She also loves shooting pool and going swing dancing, both as a leader and a follower.

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81 Words / 480 Characters

Hazel spends her days building out teams of humans as well as the systems and tooling to make life better for others. She currently serves as a Director of the Haskell Foundation, as a Fellow of the Nivenly Foundation, and is fondly known as the Infrastructure Witch of Hachyderm (a popular Mastodon instance).

One of her favorite joys is the light on someone’s face when they understand something for the first time. She also loves shooting pool, swing dancing, and boardgames.

Other Information

Headshot
Title: Fellow
Affiliated Organization: Nivenly Foundation
Email: Reach out to me to ensure you use the correct one

Frequently described as a “firehose of insights”, Hazel has become known for her uncanny ability to solve impossible problems, create centers of continuous innovation, and to inspire those around her to show up as their authentically whole selves. Hazel Weakly serves as an Engineering Leader for Software Defined Infrastructure at JPMorgan Chase, where she drives deep technical innovation on a firm wide platform transformation initiative to build the next generation of compute and networking systems.

Previously, she held the positions of Principal Architect and Head of Platform Engineering at Datavant, where she spearheaded the vision for Platform Engineering, Systems Reliability, and Developer Experience. During her tenure, her outcomes included enabling zero-downtime platform migrations across multiple environments, data informed re-imagining of developer experience, and unlocking cross-functional alignment. Hazel’s collaborative approach was instrumental in helping Datavant realize measurable improvements to organizational efficiency, engineering trust in leadership, and system reliability. Her work paved the foundations for Datavant to continue its mission of making the world’s health data secure, accessible and actionable.

As a distinguished technology leader with expertise in sociotechnical systems and organizational transformation, Hazel has rapidly made a name for herself due to her ability to enact lasting change. Known for her holistic and empathetic approach to engineering leadership, Hazel excels in building high-performing, diverse teams and fostering cultures of technical excellence. Her leadership philosophy emphasizes developer thriving, cross-functional collaboration, and data-driven decision-making. She believes, and demonstrates, that excellence and high performance does not require sacrificing what makes humans magical.

As a respected voice in the technology community, Hazel serves on the Board of Directors for the Haskell Foundation and holds the distinction of being the first Fellow of the Nivenly Foundation. Hazel’s writing is read worldwide and she is an internationally sought after keynote speaker who has spoken at some of the most prominent conferences in the world, including UK’s State of Open Con, QCon San Francisco, and Kubecon NA. Her mission is to help create a world in which people learn together and work to build a sense of wholeness in their own communities.

Hazel’s vision centers on transforming how humanity approaches knowledge work with a focus on understanding emergent behavior. Systems that enable rapid innovation, maintain stringent compliance standards, and embrace the complexities of humanity, are natural outcomes of that understanding. As she guides the industry to push the boundaries of what’s possible, she remains determined to continuously make the world better than she finds it.