Josh Teneycke

Ruby is my oldest language, and will always have a soft spot in my heart. It's flexible enough to let one make messes of arbitrary sizes, and there is something of an art and science not to paint yourself into a corner with your own abstractions. I've worked on over a dozen projects in it myself, and helped my students at Bitmaker Labs with more than a hundred others.

I started learning JavaScript around the same time I began learning Ruby, and it's my second most fluent language. The last few years I've studied the frontend space extensively to round my self out, and I'm well versed in the patterns, tools, and ecosystems in this constantly shifting space.

My first Web Development mentor was an incredible Vimmer, and I marvelled at how effortlessly code morphed under her fingers. Being something of an old hand in the Linux culture, I knew I had to add this to my repetoire. Vim rewards dedicated practice, and on the other side of years of well worn muscle memory and the sublime joy of seeing blocks of code transformed with mere gestures, my only regret is that I didn't start it sooner! I love to share configuration tips and keybindings, and if you're looking to have a more seemless and ergonomic experience with your development environment, I have a *ton* of useful things to share with you - regardless of skill level or experience. :)

Linux and I go waaaaaaayyy back, and I fondly remember installing Distro's from CD's that needed a floppy to boot. (It was a miracle when Live CD's first appeared!) I've gone through over a dozen distro's, and wrote scripts to fix the inevitable broken stuff in most of them over the years. Through the lense of "shell colored glasses" many an arduous task is reduced to a oneliner, and once you automate your first repetitive click boogy, it's hard to look at the world quite the same again. Notorious for installing "Oh-my-zsh" and Fish shell on my students machines when I was mentoring at Bitmaker Labs, I'm a passionate advocate for developer ergonomics, and helping make this experience colorful, friendly, and tab-autocompleteable. YOSO: You Only Script Once

Not so much languages as data structures in my books, I seem to recall picking these up while still in highschool before the web exploded in complexity, and got all JavaScript-y. When you study other language ecosystems, you quickly come to realize there are less "pointy" markup languages that compile down to HTML & CSS, and make the editing experience much more enjoyable. I don't mind working on HTML for brief stints, but if I'm gonna be chipping on a project for a while, my tendency is to setup the build pipeline to use Haml or Pug, given half a chance.

The general JavaScript zeigtgeist is moving away from CoffeeScript in favor of ES6 and whatnot, but it's whitespace sensitivity makes it very pleasant to work with if you do line based editing, and sometimes I'll even run JS through a transpiler to Coffee just to read it.

I've been dabbling with Clojure and many Lisp variants for almost as long as Ruby, but keep on coming back to languages with the 'ol Algol syntax. Recently have been committing to using Emacs more than Vim as my daily driver, so my full "Lisp-iphany" may be finally upon me.