I am a Ruby and JavaScript developer based in San Francisco, California. I’m the Chief Consultant at DevMynd Software, where I spend most of my time pairing with my clients’ developers, helping level up their team. My particular areas of interest are OOP, service refactorings, growing teams, and inter-developer dynamics.
I’ve written here about my experiences pair programming while I was at Pivotal Labs, and also my approach to testing. But my most popular article, by a huge margin, is about the dangers of shiny new technology.
I’m writing a book with Sandi Metz about how to refactor Rails applications towards happiness. Fingers crossed, we’ll finish it soon!
Obligatory links to my Twitter, GitHub, and LinkedIn.
Community
Super important!
I founded RailsBridge in 2009 with Sarah Allen. We run free two-day workshops for members of under-represented groups in tech who want to learn Ruby on Rails. We’ve brought the awesome of programming thousands of new people. For upcoming events, check out the BridgeTroll, the application we wrote to manage workshops. BTW the BridgeTroll code is open source and we’re always looking for new contributors!
Last year I founded another organization, Bridge Foundry, to bring our successful model to other communities. I’m super pleased to see ClojureBridge, ngBridge, and MobileBridge get going under that umbrella.
I recently joined the board of Ruby Together, a non-profit dedicated to preserving and strengthening the Ruby language infrastructure that all of us invisibly depend on. You and your company should consider becoming members if you have Ruby code in your organization.
Finally – I am a director of Ruby Central, the non-profit that runs the two largest Ruby conferences in the world – RubyConf and RailsConf. While it was still extant, I also helped run the Golden Gate Ruby Conference (GoGaRuCo) here in San Francisco, our not-quite-so-regional regional Ruby conference.
In addition to running conferences, I do a lot of speaking at them, as well as some new speaker mentoring. I’ve written here about how to write an effective conference talk proposal.
My other active mentoring includes working with students at Hackbright Academy in San Francisco, and various other one-off teaching projects for adults and teenagers.
Contacting Me
The best way to get ahold of me is via Twitter. If you’re feeling old skool, though, you can email me at (my Twitter name) @ gmail. Be warned that I am very bad at email.
