Hi, I'm Steve.
I make websites.
I mostly talk about making websites.
Just before I got my college degree in theatre I found I could work more reliably by building websites for theatre companies. And it was more enjoyable than the regular grind in the Chicago improv and non-profit theatre world?
I didn’t expect that.
But after about a decade focused on building sites, mostly in WordPress and Drupal, I joined up with Pantheon where I’m now the Director of Developer Relations. It’s a dream job that encourages me to connect the technical surface details of web development to the deeper human forces that influence how teams operate. That’s led me to
- Deliver conference presentations in iambic pentameter to heighten the drama of website relaunches. ↓
- Trace the history of front-end rendering strategies so that we stay on the state of the art, not the bleeding edge.↓
- Share WordPress best practices at DrupalCon to build bridges between these sibling communities ↗️
- Collaborate with (Faux) Al Gore to represent Continuous Integration statuses in the physical world. ↓
On my personal channels you'll find videos and ideas that are even weirder, or more sincere, or both (I mean I don't know what exactly led me to summarize a Ted Talk as a sonnet).
I'm also married with children. While fatherhood has definitely influence the style and direction of my work (leading me into my Mr. Rogers era), I tend to keep family stuff off open social networks. Maybe when the kids get older they'll opt in to joining my shenanigans.
If "code is poetry," then I will write poetry about code
As The Pandemic began, I was already reading (and listening) to the Emily Wilson translation of The Odyssey. That accessible adaptation primed me to think about what I'd do if my work ever got back to in-person conference presentations. Of course I'd adapt my last conference presentation from the pre-pandemic times into iambic pentameter.
Sonnet Summaries (mostly of other people's stuff)
Somewhat on a whim, I posted a sonnet I'd written that summaried a TED Talk to LinkedIn. It blew up a bit and I kept going.
You need three things to earn coworkers’ trust:
Empathy, logic, Authenticity
Form a stable stool that you can adjust.
But the stool wobbles in toxicity.
Sneaking in meter
This silly comedy sketch about the sprawling complexity of websites is written in iambic pentameter. Notice how the CTO's thoughts spill over to the next line :lol:
Changing the medium changes the message
Back at DevOps Days Minneapolis 2019 I presented an Ignite Talk in character as former Vice President and Technology Enthusiast, Al Gore.
Book in my Background: Understanding Media
In the “Book in My Background” series for LinkedIn I talked about how this book influences my work.
IoT: Tool or Toy? The 2017 Edition
In my last work-task before going on paternity leave I shared my reflections on the blurry line between jokes and tech insights at MidCamp.
An interlude of some silly vertical videos
What computer assembles the website?
The answer to this question is surprisingly slippery.