Born and raised in Boulder, Colorado, I grew up on a healthy diet of rocks and spent my childhood constructing electro-mechanical contraptions and pursuing various methods of scaling and/or descending roof tops, cliffs, trees, canyons, and mountains.
I have an engineering degree with an electrical specialty from the Colorado School of Mines. I worked part time during college, first at NCAR where I babysat the super computers, and then at NA Tech where I constructed robots with lasers on them, self-erecting wind towers, induction heating robotic deck plate straighteners, and many other neural network powered robotic systems. When I graduated I came on full time as the 4th employee.
After the robots I moved up the software stack, writing code and leading product engineering at Blue Dot Solutions where Kate and I traveled the world, living abroad in Scotland, while developing mobile enterprise software in the pre-iPhone era.
From there, I jumped at the chance to join GitHub in the very beginning of 2011 as one of the first 20 employees and I just can’t seem to quit. I built the v3 REST API with @technoweenie, released GitHub for Windows with @cameronmcefee, hacked on libgit2 bindings, ran product for all of the GitHub Platform, pricing and payments, and a number of smaller projects like the 1.0 release of Git LFS. I was a major contributor to tree-sitter and shipped the first code navigation features on GitHub. I’ve spent the last few years working on blackbird, a blazing fast, GitHub-scale, code search engine, written from scratch in Rust.
I currently live in the Marin redwoods with my wife Kate and our two children.
