I'm Brandon Valentine, but most folks in tech just call me bval. I have a giant beard, and am easily recognized by it.
I work hard to bring warmth, humor, and openness to everything I do and I seek those qualities in others.
I'm a Director of Expert Services at GitHub, the website you are reading this on. I have been fortunate to have the opportunity to build one of the highest performing and most diverse teams of engineers at our company, and together we empower some of GitHub's largest and most important customers to adopt our platform, and transform their software development practices into something more modern, efficient, and enjoyable.
I still manage to write software for myself occasionally. I’m a polyglot programmer most comfortable in Ruby on Rails. I have worked for long stretches in Javascript, PHP, and Perl. I am an expert SQL developer and can write complex reporting queries comfortably and efficiently. I have done occasional smaller projects in many other platforms including C#/.NET, ObjC, and Swift. I have deep experience in UNIX systems administration and devops. I have worked with AWS extensively, and have written Puppet and Chef in multiple contexts.
I'm also a founding member of the Board of Directors at the Nashville Software School, a 501(c)3 non-profit vocational school. I have also served as one of the initial volunteer curriculum developers, and as an occasional guest lecturer and instructor. In the past 10 years I have been honored to work with the Executive Director and other board members to oversee the organization’s growth into a self-sustaining, self-funded non-profit and graduate over 2000 students and counting. Unlike many for-profit coding bootcamps, we offer scholarships to many of our students and bet on their future — receiving no remuneration unless they successfully land a job as a software developer. Our organization has transformed the already rich pool of software developers in Nashville with an even more diverse and growing group of talent.