The Geek Talk

Who is Corey Donohoe?

Some dude who happens like to programming.  I work at GitHub, an amazing website dedicated to software collaboration.  I love disruptive and irreverent things.

One of my friends in SF described me to his wife as a grown up skater punk.

Where and when did you start programming?

I learned to program about 10 years ago.  After high school I bummed around southern California for a while and ended up studying chess.  I eventually realized that being a bum wasn’t gonna give me the flexibility I wanted in my life so I moved in with my parents in Memphis Tennessee to go to university.

Most of my friends were back in California so I got a computer to keep in touch with them.  Shortly after that I tore all the ligaments off of my right ankle and spent 3 months in a walking cast.  During that time I spent all day every day talking to friends and trying to find new music online.  Discovering new music ultimately led me to dig into Linux and open source software.  I idolized the people building the enlightenment window manager at the time and wanted to be a part of it.  I ended up spending a lot of time hacking X11 and enlightenment stuff during university.  Hacking on open source was a great complement to a formal CS degree.

Why Ruby/Rails?

I chose ruby a few years ago because of the simplicity of it all.  I learned C++/Java in university but wasn’t ever a big fan, I actually preferred straight up C over those languages.  Ruby worked well with the way I modeled objects in my brain at the time so I started using it everywhere.  I found the barrier to collaboration much lower than other languages and it worked well as a perl replacement in the hybrid deployment/operations role I was in at the time.

I chose rails for the community, at least what it was 4-5 years ago.  The majority of the people who were into rails early on were mind-blowingly creative. These days it’s matured and has gained acceptance, and with that comes structure and people building things for the masses instead of building things that are simple and do one thing well.  I still think there’s an insane amount of creativity/awesomeness in the ruby community I just think those people get drowned out because it’s so large.  I think the same kind of energy that existed in the ruby community a few years ago is visible in what has built up around node.js.

What does your typical day look like?

Crawl outta bed around 9-10 am, feed my two dogs.  Check campfire/twitter/email for bug reports/gripes from customers.  Make an americano.  Pick up on whatever I left off the day before for GitHub. 2-3 days a week I go into the office to see my coworkers. Hopefully ship fixes/enhancements. Make an animated gif or two.  Grab a tasty IPA or maybe some bourbon. Rinse & Repeat for M-F, hopefully get outta the city on the weekend.

What do you do in your free time?

I’ve been slowly learning how to surf over the past year.  I really enjoy cycling around SF, biking across the Golden Gate bridge or out to the ocean makes for an amazing Saturday.  I also enjoy riding in the trees at Heavenly on my snowboard in the winter.  I’m a huge fan of live music and art.  I’m kind of a sucker for a shitty movie marathon too.

Current favorite apps?

GitHub, Chrome, Skitch, Echofon, 1password, Propane, Limechat, Adium, Mailplane, iTerm, PDFPen, uTorrent, Tunnelblick, MacVIM, Cinderella.

What OS do you prefer?

OSX for my laptop, Linux for remote machines.

Small picture for your Workplace?

Favorite: Color, Font, Language, JS Framework?

• Favorite Color: Red
• Favorite Font: Comic Sans
• Language: Ruby
• JS Framework: jQuery for client side stuff, node for server side.

Name something that has inspired you recently?

Basically everything Aaaron Patterson has been doing.  His talks and software keep getting better and better.  He’s appears to balance playfulness and technical expertise really well.

I’ve also be really excited by “If we don’t, remember me” a tumblr account that makes animated gifs out of classic movies.  I couldn’t help but wonder how they made them and what made them choose certain scenes.

What do you prefer (and why)? Freelance work or full time employment?

I prefer full time employment.  I had a paper route for about 5 years when I was a teenager and the one thing I loathed was collecting.  I hate pursuing money but I love when people are willing give it to me at regular intervals. ;) When I’m into a project I think about it all the time, it’s hard to give an hourly rate for something I’m constantly thinking about.

What are your personal projects and goals for 2011?

I’d like to move my Cinderella project away from chef for bootstrapping and distribute it as a ready to go .dmg file, then use chef to maintain the installation.  I’d like to continue releasing bits of GitHub infrastructure as open source projects as well.  I have a few other smaller open source projects I’d like to keep functional: hancock, scroauth, ciderapp.org and others.  I like to keep a few simple things around as examples for myself and others.

I really want to get more and more people on GitHub as well.  I’m hoping that attending a few conferences will help me get to know more of our customers.  Ienjoy the fact that my job overlaps with my personal projects quite a bit. :)

I’d also like to learn another language or two.