A few months ago, I was asked to give the keynote address at the BlasterHacks hackathon hosted at Mines by their ACM chapter. I wasn’t quite sure what would be interesting to talk about for the keynote, so I asked some friends. Byron suggested that I either talk about hackathon advice or career advice. Since I was giving a hackathon keynote, I decided to focus my presentation on hackathon advice. I went to six hackathons while I was a student at Mines, and won prizes at all but one of them so I felt I had something interesting to say about the topic.

Donald Trump has made two vice presidential picks. In 2016 he chose Mike Pence, and in 2024 he chose JD Vance. Each of these picks was brilliant in its own right.

2016: Mike Pence

During the 2016 Republican primary, Trump faced significant resistance from within the Republican party for having a morally objectionable character, for not being a principled conservative, and for not having enough requisite understanding of politics to successfully run an administration. However, Trump emerged from a hotly contested primary ahead of Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio, two highly respected figures within the Republican establishment.

I have decided that I will not stand again in this year’s Matrix Governing Board elections. I recently joined Can/Am Technologies as a tech lead and I do not feel like I can dedicate a sufficient amount of time to be a good board member. Thus, I have decided to step aside and let others have a chance to take on the challenge of governance.

Today I am happy to announce that I have joined Can/Am Technologies as a Senior Implementation Tech Lead.

Can/Am makes a point of sale product for local governments called Teller. I worked for Can/Am in the past as a software developer and I am excited to return after nearly a decade in a new capacity. I will be leading the engineering team responsible for building integrations with third-party vendors. I’m excited about the opportunity this position will afford me to leverage my experience teaching and mentoring students at Mines in a new challenge of leading and mentoring a technical team.

In this article we are going to be investigating how the code you write gets to your users. This article is intended for consumption by computer science and software engineering students to provide insights into technologies and processes you might encounter in industry. This will be focused specifically on software delivery in web-based SaaS offerings rather than more traditional software delivery methods such as those seen in embedded systems. Every software project has different process for building, testing, and deploying to users and I’m not going to discuss every possible technology which might be used for each of these steps. Rather, I’m going to be describing what kinds of software might be used. I’ll describe how these systems affect the day-to-day work of software engineers, and I’ll also provide some thoughts on how you might integrate some of these ideas into your own personal projects.

For the third year in a row, I attended FOSDEM, a Free and Open Source Software conference. I enjoyed the previous two years, and Automattic paid for me to attend, so I decided to make the hop across the pond to attend again. FOSDEM is one of the main gatherings of the Matrix community every year (probably second only to the Matrix Conference), and there is also a sizeable Go presence at the conference as well.

Today I visited the Waterloo battlefield. I’d visited the town of Waterloo and the Wellington Museum last year when I came to FOSDEM, but I didn’t have time to go to the actual battlefield site. I bought a ticket that was valid for a year for both the museum and battlefield site, so I was able to use the same ticket.

I once again am making a trip across the pond for FOSDEM. This time, instead of flying to Brussels, I chose to fly to London a few days early and then take the Eurostar to Brussels. The nice thing about this itinerary is that I was able to take a direct flight from Denver to London, Heathrow. The flight was not very full, and I ended up with a whole row to myself!

Today I’m announcing that Sublime Music has reached end-of-maintenance. This announcement is greatly overdue, as I have not been actively maintaining the project for over a year, and have not been actively developing new features for even longer.

Thank You!

I would like to start off by thanking everyone who used Sublime Music, reported bugs, interacted in the Matrix room, and wrote code for the project. This project is the most successful open source project I’ve started, and I am grateful for the community that formed around it.

This week, Beeper had our second meetup after being acquired by Automattic earlier this year. Unlike the last retreat in Porto which had lots of other Automattic employees in attendance, this was just our team and was focused on work and planning less than team-building.

Automattic is a remote-only company, so work retreats are the only time that we can connect with our co-workers in-person and build stronger personal relationships among the team. The best part is that we get to go to cool locations for these meetups. You can read about all the previous work retreats on this blog.