Hi! 👋🏼 I'm Brent.

I'm a software engineer based in Portland, Oregon that specializes in Ruby on Rails with a double-minor in frontend development and agile processes/organizational design. I believe that boring tech is good tech, and that we must build software for real users, taking their needs and foibles into account.

Ruby on Rails is just the best

I have been working in Rails since 2005, when Rails was at v0.9.7. It's come a long way. It's not perfect by any means — no framework is — but it's still the best thing I've seen for rapid iteration on a web app. The minimal boilerplate along with the expressiveness of Ruby make it a pleasure to work in.

With the recent addition of the Hotwire stack, in particular Stimulus and its bestie StimulusReflex, building a web app with server-side rendering and a reactive pattern is a breeze.

Where I want to be

I'm excited about working for a company that's trying to make the world a better place: climate tech, healthcare and science/academia are three sectors I'm interested in.

My ideal role is at the senior or lead level, where I can not only contribute technically but also work on some of the more human and process parts of the team. I have extensive process design and facilitation experience, and it's work that I find profoundly satisfying.

A note about AI

In general, I'm an AI skeptic. Although LLMs can be useful tools — they're great at writing first drafts —, they don't have any notion of epistemology and are prone to massive hallucinations. As I told one of my colleagues, if I had a human teammate who made stuff up as much as ChatGPT I'd be having a conversation with our manager about them. LLMs also have very poorly understood security and privacy concerns. Once you bypass the hype marketing and look at the research, generalized AI looks impossible.

In short, I believe that AI is one of many useful tools in my toolbox, but it's not the holy grail the AI companies claim it is.