I’m a software developer and builder. I’ve been programming and diving deep into the depths of computers since I was a teenager and 20+ years later I still can’t get enough. I’m most experienced building (and scaling!) web apps with Ruby/Rails and JavaScript, but I’m quickly falling in love with Rust and TypeScript as my tools of choice.
Previously, I spent just shy of 9 years at Discourse as a Senior Software Engineer. I was an early employee (#11) and worked in many different capacities from devops like roles, doing feature development in Rails and Emberjs, to working closely with enterprise customers and users to build an amazing product they love.
I thrive on solving customer problems as well as improving the tools we use every day. My favorite moments come from delivering unanticipated delight when shipping ideas that merge naturally from deep product knowledge and a strong sense of what users are really after.
Outside of work, I’m a husband, parent, snowboarder, and car nerd. If I’m not at a keyboard, I’m probably tinkering on a Subaru in my garage, or escaping up in the mountains to snowboard somewhere in Idaho.
Some hobby projects I’m currently building are:
- Recourss (an RSS reader app)
- ofcourse.chat (hosted Discourse just-chat instances)
- ntbk.co (a notetaking app)
Some GitHub projects you should checkout:
- just-chat - The main plugin used for ofcourse.chat
- mrgarvey - A rust service that runs and manages ofcourse.chat instances.
My open source work in other orgs you can checkout:
- Oxide.computer: https://github.com/search?q=org%3Aoxidecomputer+author%3Aoblakeerickson&type=pullrequests
- Discourse: https://github.com/search?q=org%3Adiscourse+author%3Aoblakeerickson+author%3Ablake-discourse&type=pullrequests
Checkout my personal website blake.app to learn more about me and to see what I've been writing on my blog. Also checkout my .plan site to see what I have planned for today.
I’m currently on the lookout for a one-of-a-kind founder led company that I can apply my decades of software engineering obsession into. If that’s you and you are hiring, hit me up!