We all hear about the great products being built within Chicago’s digital startups. But there’s also great digital work being done after hours and on the weekends by our city’s most dedicated and creative employees: our developers. This series will be giving some love to a few local devs who are super active with various personal projects - which are showcased on their GitHub profiles. To recommend a local developer for this series, email [email protected].
Jeremy Kahn (https://github.com/jeremyckahn)
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Day job: New products developer at Jellyvision since September, works mainly on infrastructure
Outside-of-work obsession: animation
GitHub gems:
- Rekapi is “an animation library that’s meant to make more complex animations easier to use than ever. It’s a cool tool that can be used in other projects to help take the pain out of sophisticated-looking animations.”
- Stylie is “a fun tool for easily creating CSS 3 animations. You can configure your animation graphically, tweak it, grab the generated CSS and go.”
Regular meetups: Html5 meetup, Node meetup
What keeps him going: “In general, I just feel that open source is an important thing to do on many levels. For one, it helps me learn things that I’m interested in that my day job might not let me do. There’s things you have to do at work and there’s things you want to explore on your own. An open source project lets you do that. I feel it’s important to give back to the community and put it out there for people who are passionate about it. And if people aren’t contributing back to that environment, then it doesn’t work. I think that could help perpetuate the ecosystem and perpetuate what makes technology work so well today. I think it’s important to devote some of my personal time to help make that happen.”
How to help him: “Ultimately, I just want feedback and that’s one of the hardest parts about open source. A lot of the time you just get no feedback at all.”
From San Francisco to Chicago: “Chicago is a pretty good community. I lived in San Francisco for two years - and it was more active there, but things are gaining momentum in Chicago certainly. In San Francisco, if someone is working on a project, they could give a ‘lightning talk’ at a meetup to quickly share it with people. I always thought the lightning talk was the most interesting part of a meetup because you never knew what was coming and it was someone’s hobby and it focuses more on what people are individually passionate about.”
Why animation: “I went to Columbia College in Chicago and majored in game programming. We had to learn Flash and I really, really didn’t like Flash, so I figured the best thing I could do was make my own better version of Flash. The way to start going about that was to build a basic animation stylistic library and build up from there. That turned into its own thing, so I never really got to building the rest of that whole big dream. My motivation has changed over time, but that’s how it started.”
Aaron Bedra (https://github.com/abedra)
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Day job: Principal consultant at security software company Cigital’s Chicago office. Previously at Braintree and Groupon.
Outside-of-work obsession: Clojure
Why Clojure: “Clojure was about six months old when I first found it. For those who haven't already heard of Clojure, it is a lisp dialect that runs on the JVM. It one of the first lisp variants that seemed like a viable option. After looking into it, I was hooked. I actually spent several years helping build the language and its core libraries, and wrote a book on it as well. It is a mostly functional programming language that captures the great parts of a lot of languages and puts them together into a small, simple language.”
Github contributions:
- Repsheet is “a reputation engine designed to help manage threats against web applications.” It is currently used by Braintree.
- Teaching people to learn Clojure via a project started back in 2010.
- Brakeman, which is “a Ruby on Rails static analysis tool that looks for potential security issues in RoR projects.”
Where to find him outside of work: “I enjoy mentoring. I spend a little time at Dev Bootcamp every now and then working with students. I try to get to the various meetups as frequently as possible. There's at least one a week somewhere in the city, so there's no shortage of ways to connect.”
Why Chicago: “I think Chicago is a great city for tech. It tends to get overlooked by people looking to New York and the valley, but I honestly think it rivals both in terms of talent and potential. The community would do better to come together more often though. The segregation based on language or technology seems like a strange barrier to me.”
Kevin Decker (https://github.com/kpdecker)
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Day job: Architect for Walmart's mobile web presence, primary client advisor to hapi.
What he is looking forward to this year: “For me, 2014 is the year of Node for the frontend developer. There are many companies such as Walmart and Groupon who are leading the way on Node adoption, but I feel that this year is poised to expand dramatically.”
A few of his current GitHub projects:
- Handlebars is “a JavaScript templating engine that is quite popular for client-side developers. I started working on handlebars because there were a few features that I wanted to implement. Over time I ended up in the role of maintaining the project; I am recently averaging probably two days of time a month.”
- jsdiff is “a text differencing library built in JavaScript. jsdiff is an offshoot of the firediff project that isn't really in active development anymore. firediff itself came out of my work with the Firebug Working Group many years and jobs ago.”
Business and pleasure: “We have a very liberal open source at WalmartLabs so the exact line between my personal and work projects can be a bit blurry at times. If I were to mark projects as specifically personal I'd say that handlebars and jsdiff venture more into the personal realm but each project of mine scratches a personal itch at some level.”
How he connects with Chicago: “Being remote and having most of my direct coworkers living in different time zones, meetups are my primary way of connecting with the local tech community. I attend the Node.js meetup and JS.chi, but there are numerous others that I try to frequent as time permits. From everything that I can see, Chicago's tech community is growing at an amazing rate and we need to continue down this path. Each time that I see a tech t-shirt while out and about, overhear a tech conversation at a coffee shop or hear about the work that 1871 and others are doing this is further reinforced in my mind.”
