Hi. My name's Guy. And yes, that's my real name.
Here are a few things about me:
- I'm a hard-boiled geek interested in more things than I have time for.
- I'm husband to my wife of over 30 years and the father of three wonderful young men.
- I'm a rather seasoned software engineer with the gray beard to prove it.
- I'm a public speaker and have spoken about technology all over Europe and North America.
I also do some independent work on the side. If you need an engineer, a teacher of tech, or some fractional developer relations work, check out my website.
- TTRPGs — I've been playing D&D and other TTRPGs since the early 80s. And I build the model terrain to go with my games.
- Radio — I like radio, all those signals out there encoded in invisible light. I'm a licensed amateur radio operator—callsign W8GUY.
- Electronics — I studied electronics in high school—analog and digital—and like building my circuit boards and messing with programmable microcontrollers.
- Alternative Networks — I like alternative and decentralized technology like IPFS, Reticulum, and Veilid. I think crypto is kinda neat but I'm not a crypto bro.
- Linguistics — I can't get enough etymology in my live. I love learning where words come from and how grammar works. I've studied Latin and Spanish.
But the code interfaces with all of it:
- I taught TDD and pair programming by having everyone code D&D using the Evercraft Kata.
- I tracked aircraft using a software-defined radio dongle and some custom-build software.
- I displayed my CPU utilization using an Arduino, a serial port, and an 80 year-old volt meter.
- I built a web browser and server for Reticilum.
- I gave a talk on how English impacted programming languages and explored what JavaScript might have looked like of it had be created by the Ancient Romans.
And all the code I write for these things. Well, it ends up here on GitHub.
I speak at conferences about the weird and wonderful stuff that I build and share. A few favorites:
- Codex: The Impact of English on Programming Languages
- Dungeons, Dragons, and Graph Databases
- Finding Your Meme Twin with Embeddings & Vector Databases
- Plucking Data from Thin Air with Software-Defined Radio
- Putting the D&D in TDD
- Tracking Aircraft with Streams + Sfotware-Defined Radio
- Understanding Probabilistic Data Structures with 112,092 UFO Sightings
- You've Probably Never Heard of the Reticulum Network
Check out my full speaking portfolio on Sessionize.
- mesh-browser — Browse websites over Reticulum
- rserver — A basic HTTP server for the Reticulum Network
- plucking-data-from-thin-air — A software-defined radio workshop
- tracking-aircraft — Real-time ADS-B flight tracking with Redis Streams
- evercraft-kata — Code D&D for fun and profit
- gilded-rose-javascript — The Gilded Rose refactoring kata
- vending-machine-kata — Classic TDD kata