Hey 👋🏻 I met a bunch of folks from this community a couple of weeks ago as we took a scenic and circuitous route to the Strange Loop conference via train from Seattle to St Louis. (See photo) My claim to fame is I'm the co-lead of the https://github.com/cucumber open source project, it's a tool for running executable acceptance tests that can be read and written in plan language. I also wrote a book about it, many moons ago. I've been involved with it for 15 years now! AMA about trying to fund open source projects and make them sustainable. I have no answers but I've tried plenty of things that didn't work! I've always been one of those people who can talk to humans as well as computers, so I often end up being the translator in the social system in and around a programming team. That's what got me interested in Cucumber and BDD in the first place, but it's also what attracts me to this podcast and the community here. I'm English originally but these days I live in a little mountain town called Nelson in the unceded territory of the Ktunaxa Nation, Sinixt Nation, and Syilx Peoples, more commonly known as south-eastern British Columbia.

Hi Matt! Welcome, and please forgive me as I'm about to blow your cover! For anyone who listened to the recent Considered Harmful episode, Matt is the lovely British voice dropping "Edsger F[clarinet]ing Dijkstra" a few times, which for me as editor was a personal highlight of the episode :)

I just listened to that! Delighted for my cameo and happy to provide some northern english grit to any future episode's soundscape 🙂

What a great photo!

Matt, I was going to ask if you knew Aslak Hellesoy, until I followed the link to your book. I had the privilege of working with Aslak on a couple of projects earlier in my career. Welcome to the group!

Hi Greg, yes I know Aslak extremely well! We ran Cucumber Ltd together for six years, and we're still running the open source project together. He's a force of nature!

Say "hi" to Aslak for me, if he remembers me from ThoughtWorks!

Hey Matt! So glad to see you here. It was great getting meet at strangeloop :)