I am Colin Dean, a software engineer and community builder who uses technology to unite people and help them discover the answers to their questions through meaningful and delightful interactions.
I speak at conferences and have run conferences and conventions since I was 17 and non-profits since I was 20. You can read more about me at my website, cad.cx.
I prefer to engage in English. It's OK to ask me to repeat myself because my Pittsburghese accent sometimes gets in the way. In order of familiarity as of 2023, I am a student of Esperanto since 2003 and Dutch since 2023. I've learned bits of some others 1.
- Code & Supply (gitlab & github), Pittsburgh's premiere community of software professionals that hosts meetups, conferences like Abstractions and Heartifacts, and runs a co-working space oriented toward software folks.
- Code & Supply Scholarship Fund (gitlab), a non-profit that helps folks attend and speak at conferences in Pittsburgh and beyond
- Homebrew (github), the missing package manager for macOS (and Linux)
- Community Internet Solutions (neé Meta Mesh Wireless Communities) (github), a Pittsburgh-based non-profit bridging the digital divide by bringing Internet connectivity to those without it
- Support free and low-cost software community events in Pittsburgh and a great hyperlocal compensation survey effort by joining C&S to keep the lights on as an individual or sponsor us as a business hiring or selling to software professionals.
- Remove money as a barrier to attending tech conferences by donating to CSSF to fund tech conference travel grants as an individual, corporation, or foundation.
- Connect low-income, overlooked, and underserved communities to the Internet by donating to CIS to help us build the generation non-profit Internet service provider.
- Deliver up-to-date software safely and securely to macOS and Linux developers worldwide by donating to Homebrew to help keep packages flowing, esp. if you're a company with a budget and you use Macs for development
You could also sponsor me on GitHub sponsors. I'll put the money toward one of these or several other organizations I care about.
Cheers!
I keep some projects here on GitHub and some on GitLab. I might have something on Sourcehut or Pijul Nest with old stuff on BitBucket and really old stuff from my early development days on Launchpad.
Footnotes
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I was nearly fluent in Latin, having studied 1998–2007. I have some knowledge of Spanish, French, and Portuguese, mostly thanks to Duolingo or high school language classes, but not enough to converse. ↩