The Open-Source Lover and Founder of Docker, Solomon Hykes

Solomon Hykes is the founder of Docker, a 2nd-generation platform-as-a-service that makes it exceedingly easy for developers to deploy and scale their applications while also providing the flexibility and resilience that important business software need. Docket was once known as DotCloud.

Prior joining Docker, Solomon worked at CEIS and SmartJog in engineering, IT infrastructure management, and software development. His parents relocated to France when he was a child, and he grew up there. Hykes started programming while he was a teenager. He skipped classes for the majority of high school to work at a nearby cyber café doing programming tasks. He eventually enrolled in a software engineering programme at a programming school.

Open-source, as planned, became a component of Hykes’ atmosphere. He was an early adopter of open-source, and it remained a key component of the companies he founded and the technologies he developed. When he founded DotCloud, he began open-sourcing most of the technology he and his team created. So, during the course of the company’s existence, it open-sourced a few dozen various projects, and eventually, one of the projects we open-sourced was Docker, which became the most successful. He renamed the company after it because it was so successful.

Solomon, a Forbes 30 under 30 and YCombinator alumnus, served as Chief Executive Officer of dotCloud for five years, leading the company through fundraising, business operations, and product launches before focusing solely on Docker. Solomon’s goal at Docker is to provide a platform that allows developers and system administrators to create, ship, execute, and coordinate distributed applications.

Docker is one of the few examples of how open source and business can coexist. Only a few organisations are able to strike that balance, and Hykes has developed Docker into one of them. Because he was very deliberate, his approach was unusual from the start.