Hello all. I’m Chad, an old saxophonist turned programmer turned (after 30 years) VC with BlueYard Capital. I spent many years in the early Ruby community. Wrote some books, organized a bunch of conferences, helped write Ruby’s package manager, managed a bunch of people, etc. I’m a fan of the local first software movement (I met @Maggie Appleton at the first local first conference in Berlin earlier this year). I love things like esoteric programming languages and other fun wastes of time. My colleague Ben Scofield and I organized a conference in Iceland in 2018 called The Future of Software Development, which makes it surprising to me that I’m only now joining this community. I am professionally based in New York (as both a tech person and a jazz musician) but I travel constantly and hope to make it to a London meetup one of these days. Currently in flight on the way home from London as it happens. Though I’m a VC I still write code almost daily. I also have some pet ideas for generative software development that might be both interesting and controversial. Currently spending what free time I have learning about mechanism design and game theory.

Big fan of “The passionate programmer”, awesome to have you here

Thank you! ❤️

Oh, hi Chad! I remember you from my ThoughtWorks days, when everyone caught the Ruby bug!

Hey! Fellow sax player here, though lately I barely find the time to play. Horn badly in need of maintenance. Left the case unattended for months and for whatever reason my dukoff doesn't play anymore, it sort of bended (few millimeters) and the reed can't sit flat on it =/

if it's an alto let me know if you want me to ship you a spare mouthpiece 🙂 (somehow got disconnected from this slack for a while so forgive the months-late repy)