Geoffrey Broadwell

I'm a huge fan of the Raku programming language (I even sit on the Raku Steering Council), but I've learned quite a few languages over the years; I sometimes joke that I've forgotten more computer languages than most people learn. I particularly enjoy maximizing performance without sacrificing maintainability, designing from the ground up for accessibility, and understanding the full software stack from machine instructions and bits on the wire all the way up to full applications.

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I've worked at large companies (e.g. Google, SAP, Autodesk) and tiny ones, startups and consultancies, local and international. My career has orbited around the intersection of engineering and production operations pretty much since the beginning, culminating in a long stint at Google as an SRE (an engineer specializing in reliability and scalability). At Google I also discovered that I love managing an engineering team, helping each team member to find the work that excites them and to grow on the unique path of their career.  

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I very much enjoy being a tutor and mentor, and managing gave me the opportunity to use those interests and skills in a whole new context. Right now I'm in San Jose, which is part of Silicon Valley. I will stay in northern California for the foreseeable future, though I may move around a bit.

In my spare time I actually do a lot of programming as a hobby as well; if those projects turn into something worth sharing (even as a "lessons learned") I open source them. The advent of public distributed version control was a huge boon for this. Some of these projects are just exploring personal interests, or a problem that's piqued my interest. Other times I find a gap in the ecosystem and make a project out of filling that gap; often exploring a problem space leads to finding an ecosystem gap, so like my career my programming hobbies tend to orbit around.

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When I'm not programming, I enjoy hiking, playing board, card, and role playing games, reading, and studying whatever technical or academic subject caught my eye recently.