Community Involvement

I helped launch a panel-format podcast exploring tech and tech-adjacent issues. After recording approximately 75 episodes over almost three years, I stepped down as a panelist to make room for new voices.

PDX.rb is a user group for Ruby programmers in the Portland area. I've presented occasionally in the past, but since the start of the pandemic I've mostly participated via Slack. I also help out with miscellaneous chores (like administering our mailing lists and Slack community) as they arise.

Acted as a "conference buddy" to someone new to the Ruby community. See Ruby Central.

Acted as a "conference buddy" to someone new to the Ruby community. See Ruby Central.

Reviewed several hundred submissions to the conference's Call For Proposals. Selected six talks (from a pool of over 50 submissions) for the "Working With Other Humans" track, and collaborated with other Track Directors on talk selection and ordering for their tracks. Worked with speakers to help prepare their talks, and stayed in the room to help speakers get set up before their time slots.

Acted as a "conference buddy" to someone new to the Ruby community. See Ruby Central.

Acted as a "conference buddy" to someone new to the Ruby community. See Ruby Central.

I recorded a guest episode for Avdi Grimm's Ruby Tapas screencast series, describing an unusual refactoring technique I had used on a recent project. The episode was published to subscribers in June, and made available for free in December.

Joined a programming-oriented podcast as a regular panelist as of episode #258, when Avdi Grimm retired from the show. Panel imploded several months later (due, in large part, to underlying structural conflicts). The last episode I recorded was #278.

Acted as a "conference buddy" to someone new to the Ruby community. See Ruby Central.

Acted as a "conference buddy" to someone new to the Ruby community. See Ruby Central.

Helped administer Cascadia Ruby's first Opportunity Scholarship program. Proposed the idea to core conference organizers, helped secure matching grant from Ruby Central, wrote copy for the conference website, helped select Scholars and alternates, wrote personalized introduction emails for each Scholar/Guide pair, helped run pre- and post-conference meetings for Scholars and Guides.

Along with Glenn Vanderburg, I returned to this panel-format podcast to further explore some of the ideas from my "Cognitive Shortcuts" talk (see my Public Speaking page). Transcript and audio available at rubyrogues.com.

Acted as a "conference buddy" to someone new to the Ruby community. See Ruby Central.

I recorded a remote pair programming session with James Edward Gray 2 (no relation). We tackled a fun parsing problem that James had encountered on a one-day side project. Part of the idea came from an email about my earlier "tmux Quick Start Guide" screencast; the viewer asked to see how tmux worked in practice in an actual pairing session. I also wanted to show how vim and emacs can work together in the same pairing session; with any luck, our humble video will finally end the editor wars, ushering in a new Golden Age of world peace and harmony. (Okay, maybe not.)

Joined a panel of expert Ruby developers for a lively, lighthearted discussion of remote pair programming. Transcript and audio available at rubyrogues.com.

Acted as a "conference buddy" to someone new to the Ruby community. See Ruby Central.

Wrote, recorded, and edited a ten-minute screencast (YouTube video) to quickly orient new users to tmux. tmux is a powerful tool for managing multiple users and multiple terminal sessions, and is quite useful as a low-latency shared environment for remote pair programming.

Hungry Academy was a five-month training program at LivingSocial to take a small group of people and turn them into web developers. It was already under way when I joined LivingSocial in April 2012, but I participated in "Office Hours" as a senior developer on my second day in DC and was immediately blown away by the energy and sheer brainpower in the room. I continued to make myself available for office hours, and later provided 1:1 mentorship when students were paired up with senior developers. All 24 participants were hired on as developers at LivingSocial; all of them that I've spoken to or pair programmed with have been amazingly smart and capable.

Building on material from a Lunch and Learn presentation I gave to my coworkers in spring 2011, and then presented at BarCamp Portland and Cascadia Ruby (both listed below), I wrote think-like-a-git.net as a standalone website to help people increase their confidence in working with Git. As of May 2013, the site has had at least 115,000 visits from 55,000 unique visitors.

Inspired by an offhand comment on the Ruby Show podcast, I wrote a Rails plugin called HighlandAR as a joke. The hosts were so amused that not only did they feature the plugin in episode 153, they also created a Hall of Fame page to put it on.

Entered a live coding competition at FOSCON 2008. (Challenge was to develop a complete web-enabled recipe database in 20 minutes.) With partner Brian Artiaco, won first place.

Attended one-day unconference. (Wiki page)

Member 2001-2004, occasional presenter.