Edinburgh-based product and engineering leader, ex-GitHub Principal Engineer (#232, 2013), with 18 years of experience reducing developer friction and scaling open-source to tens of millions of users. Delivered 50+ conference talks, published author and writer on engineering, open-source, automation, remote work and Git. Lead product and engineering at Workbrew and Homebrew, with product engineering experience at GitHub (before they had product managers). Early GitHub Copilot reviewer with hands-on experience introducing AI-driven code assistants, reviews and chat tools to improve team velocity. Working on async remote-first international teams since 2009.
Things you might need to know:
- all open source maintainers (including me!) owe you nothing
- there's some things that good engineers do
- you should stop mentoring first-time contributors to open source projects
- if you're automating things remember that robots are better at pedantry and humans at empathy
- you should have a system to get things done (or you can copy mine)
- you should contribute to open source every friday (or, even better, every weekday)