My name is Jeff. I also go by JD if there are too many other Jeffs around. I've been writing software for a long time and have spent a good while in the dev tool space. I think a ton about how us developers do our jobs and how we can improve our tools to make better software quicker.

I hate how difficult software is to learn—particularly for new engineers. If I'm able to do anything in my career well, I hope that it's making things a little easier for the people that are new here.

Open source work I've done

• rtx - an asdf clone built in rust
• oclif - Node.JS CLI Framework
• chim - a tool for making shims that fetch remote binaries
• gh - (not the official github cli) makes it easy to switch between github projects locally

Places I've worked

I've worked for a lot of companies. Pretty much all of my recent work is on dev tools. Here are the most recent ones:

• AWS - I make JS development inside of Amazon work well. This means things like making it easy to adopt open source software as well as making sure people are on modern versions of Node.JS.
• Facebook - I worked on WhatsApp as part of the "Client Dev Infra" team. I was one of the lead engineers on a team that was responsible for making a great environment for engineers to build the WhatsApp clients (web, iOS, Android, Windows, macOS). We also managed the release and CI pipeline for pushing those clients out the door.
• Dropbox - I was on the team that made the new system tray app for Dropbox. I'm not proud of this one.
• Heroku - I was the lead engineer for the Heroku CLI. I wasn't the original developer, but I definitely worked more on the Heroku CLI than anyone else. I led the development from the Ruby CLI into a Node.JS CLI and built a CLI framework called oclif out of that effort.

Programming Languages I like

Here are my top 2 right now:

• JavaScript (particularly Node + TypeScript) – this has been my top for a long time. I love how expressive it is, how "obvious" it feels, and how much software is out there on npm waiting for me to use.
• Rust - after spending a career in scripting languages, it's great to be working with a language that's just so fast. I prefer it to Go since I can be more free to design interfaces without as many limits. For when I need things to be fast, I love how close I can be to the metal. Still, I'm a lot slower at Rust than I am at JS so for that reason it's #2 in my book.

I've worked with just about every language and really have enjoyed all of them. I've even enjoyed C++ and PHP (Hack) a lot more than I thought I would.

How to reach me

Find me on Twitter and Mastodon or post a message to my public inbox.