Hi, I’m running for the Node Foundation Board of Directors
Hi, my name is Ashley, and I’d like to be an individual member of the Node Foundation Board of Directors.
The GitHub issue for nominations is here.
To vote for me (or anyone else!), you must be a registered Individual Member of the Node Foundation.
tl;dr
I have a well-respected track record in the Node community, as well as the greater technical community, for caring about and acting for:
- improving and prioritizing technical documentation
- reasoning about developer experience, especially beginner experiences
- creating educational resources and events
- instituting inclusivity and diversity policies and practices
I’m passionate, accessible, and I get things done. My constant immersion in a diverse set of Node communities (underrepresented groups, beginners, enterprise, international) keeps me close to their concerns and positions me as an excellent advocate and representative for their needs.
Who am I?
My story with Node dates back to around two years ago when I was hired as an Educator by Bocoup, an Open Web Consultancy based out of Boston, MA. Originally, and primarily, a Rubyist, I learned Node to teach Node, and in doing so, I kinda fell in love.
Now I work as the Developer Community and Content Manager at npm, the package manager for JavaScript. That’s a pretty long, kinda silly, title; I prefer to say, “If you don’t know how npm works, that’s my problem.” In short? I make sense.
“If you don’t know how npm works, that’s my problem.”
To this end, I’ve put a lot of effort into improving npm’s documentation — in particular adding a whole guide about the history of npm and how it works. As Node grows, I think this type of documentation will be extremely valuable, as well.
Volunteer and Community Experience
Beyond teaching and developing, I have long history of community organization and event planning. While at Bocoup, I helped design and run Roost, a JavaScript training conference, and did operations work for BackboneConf. Also during that time, I aided in reviving BostonJS, a JavaScript user group, and also started the Boston chapter of Papers We Love, a meetup for reading academic CS papers.
Most recently, I presented and mentored at the jQuery Developer Summit, where I helped more than a dozen attendees from underrepresented groups get up and running with Node. By the end of the weekend I had paired with 3 women, all of whom made their first open source Pull Requests. A stellar example is this addition of emoji support in marky-markdown!
I also help organize and run EmpireNode.
My favorite part of participating in the community is speaking at a myriad of user groups, conferences, and other events, about a variety of technical topics. Highlights over the years include the Coding the Humanities Seminar at the University of Amsterdam, JSConf US 2015, RejectJS 2015 in Berlin, and most recently at Node Interactive 2015.
Am I a developer?
Am I a Node developer?
Currently I am writing a declarative-relational DSL on top of Node. My personal website is a JSON-API compliant Node API. I’ve also been a core contributor and maintainer on a (pretty dead) Node API framework.
etc, etc
What do I care about?
- Good documentation
- Developer Experience
- Language Design
- Educational Resources and Outreach
- Inclusivity and Diversity
Why should you vote for me?
jk.
I’m not sure why you’d vote for me, but I can tell you why I think it matters that at least someone like me be a part of the Foundation:
I care about and have the experience in critical subject areas:
- Documentation
- Education
- Inclusivity
These are very important items for a successful Open Source Project and Community. It turns out, a lot of people don’t know *how* to care about or act in regards to them. Most people don’t have experience creating and growing initiatives in these areas, especially at scale. However, I do.
In the spirit of having those areas prioritized and developed, voting for me might be a good idea.
Additionally, as stated above, I’m constantly immersing myself in the Node community. I organize conferences and perform trainings and talks for a wide variety of audiences, from beginners, to underrepresented groups, to international audiences, to enterprise organizations. This immersion is a perpetual lesson in the needs of Node users- which positions me well to represent and advocate for their concerns.
If you’ve got questions, feel free to comment here, or:
- @ag_dubs on Twitter or IRC
- ashley@npmjs.com
Thanks for reading! Happy democracy ;)
