Colin O'Dell

56 posts 38 talks 44 projects 7 podcasts

I accelerate business outcomes through custom software development and increasing software teams’ efficiency, effectiveness, and empowerment at SeatGeek. When I'm not solving interesting problems at work or via my open-source projects, you can find me speaking at conferences all around the world. In my free time, I also like to play ice hockey, design things for 3D printing, and tinker with home automation.

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Recent activity

26 Jul 2026 Project

Heltec v4 Wall Mount (MeshCore/Meshtastic)

I designed this case to keep my MeshCore/Meshtastic base station in the attic. It holds a Heltec v4 alongside a Type-N bulkhead antenna, with cutouts for the OLED, USB, and coax, working buttons, vents that allow airflow while keeping dust out, a post behind the USB connector for a zip tie so the cable can’t work itself loose, and two mounting holes.

Project details

04 Jul 2026 Project

Eargasm Magnet Case with Easy-Open Slot

3D Printing

A slim, magnet-closed case for carrying Eargasm earplugs. This is a remix of RMTCTRL’s original design with a slot added along the long edges, which makes the halves much easier to pull apart when you’re using strong magnets. Requires four 6mm x 2mm magnets.

Project details

10 Nov 2025 Lightning Talk

letsgo - The Ultimate Platform CLI

KubeCon NA 202510 minutes

Platform interfaces should meet developers where they are. At SeatGeek, our "letsgo" CLI brings our entire platform to the terminal, complimenting our traditional platform interfaces with a powerful command-line experience. And not just for manual ad-hoc interactions, but also within CI/CD pipelines and other custom automations!

Slides Video

10 Nov 2025 Session

Beyond Review Apps: Orchestrating Full-Stack Ephemeral Environments with Argo CD

KubeCon NA 202525 minutes

Traditional review apps often fall short when testing complex multi-service interactions. At SeatGeek, shared staging resources made this a massive pain and prevented true isolation. We solved this by building "Ephie" – an ephemeral environment capability using Argo CD that empowers engineers to create fully isolated, multi-service environments on demand.

Slides Video

22 Aug 2025 Elsewhere

Resilient Container Builds in CI with Buildkit-Operator

Sharing long-lived BuildKit instances across CI jobs cost us up to 4% of our container builds to unpredictable failures and noisy-neighbor contention. We replaced them with ephemeral, fully-isolated builders provisioned per job by a Kubernetes operator we’ve open-sourced, and build success now sits at 99.97%.

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