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 Published author, writer, and conference speaker (50+ talks) on engineering, open source, automation, remote work, and Git. Currently lead product and engineering at Homebrew; previously led at Workbrew, and contributed to product engineering at GitHub (before they had product managers). Early GitHub Copilot reviewer with hands-on experience integrating AI-driven coding assistants, review automation, and chat tools to boost team velocity. Experienced in 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)