I was most recently CTO at mental health startup Mood Health. Previously, I was the Chief Software Architect and Director of Engineering at Stitch Fix. I helped grow the engineering team and technology from 3 to 200+, establishing technology and process to help the company grow for years. I’m also an author of several programming books such as “Sustainable Web Development with Ruby on Rails”, “Agile Web Development with Rails 6”, “The Senior Software Engineer”, and “Build Awesome Command-Line Applications in Ruby 2”. I’ve spoken at regional and national programming conferences and have over 25 years of experience in the industry. Previously at LivingSocial and OPower.

I value delivering results and business value, and see technology as a powerful tool in service to those goals. I’ve delivered results to users using Ruby, C, Java, SQL, Messaging, and Microservices, and look forward to using whatever is within my means to make technology work. I fight for the users. Also a huge fan of Peter Hook and the Oxford comma.

My Writing

• Four Better Rules for Software Design - Four rules I think make good code.
• Guidelines for Brutalist Web Design - Web design doesn’t have to be boring to be usable.
• Why I’d Never Work for Google, Twitter, or Facebook - most popular of my blog posts on Hacker News.
• Source Code Typography - popular post on typesetting computer source code.
• What Makes an Awesome Command-line Application - Article for PragPub, Pragmatic Programmer’s monthly online magazine.
• Names Matter
• My Blog - mostly programming stuff.

Projects

• Starlight Dawn - An in-browser game/story in the style of 80’s tile-based RPGs.
• GLI - a DSL for making more complex command line apps in Ruby
• Adventure - My “cover” of classic 2600 game Adventure

My Books

• Ruby on Rails Background Jobs with Sidekiq - Learn how to use Sidekiq beyond a simple tutorial. 70 pages!
• Sustainable Web Development with Ruby on Rails - How to get the best out of Rails without abandoning it. Based on my 6+ years at Stitch Fix. Currently in beta!.
• SOLID is not Solid - A cynical rant on how actually harmful the SOLID principles are.
• The Senior Software Engineer - Book on being an amazing developer, published July 2013
• Agile Web Development with Rails 6 - The book on learning Ruby on Rails. I’m co-author of the older version that covers Rails 6.
• Rails, Angular, Postgres, and Bootstrap: Powerful, Effective, and Efficient Full-Stack Web Development - Book on Full Stack web development to level up your Rails skills, published July 2015, updated March 2017
• “Build Awesome Command-Line Applications in Ruby” - out of print

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