United States
I am a software advocate and speaker. I love to build tools to help others. I like to advocate for open-source software in my legacy industry, by showing people how to integrate GitHub, Node.js, and VS Code into their COBOL, RPG, and Db2 environments - mostly IBM i systems. I am fortunate enough that my work allows me to not only write new code, but help others use new tech to write new code. Pre-covid I was an in-person speaker at more than 5 conferences a year, including IBM Think (2019), COMMON Europe & US, plus plenty of user groups. Since then, I am back to speaking regularly at in-person events. I also just ran my own online event for the first time in 2021, again in 2022 and it was a huge success. My largest contribution to my industry is a few VS Code extensions I have written that allow developers to write and compile legacy languages like RPG and COBOL, as well as tools for legacy unit testing and code coverage. This is all targetted at an OS named IBM i, previously AS/400.
