Matt Darby

Sublime VS Vim

I’ve used Vim religiously since 2010 and I have used SublimeText for the last month as…

KalamazooX 2015

I’ve attended the last three KalamazooX Conferences and each year I leave inspired enough to move mountains; it’s a deeply invigorating experience.

I was honored to be part of the planning committee this year and I even had the opportunity to run a Fishbowl before the…

What is a Developer Advocate?

“Developer Advocate” is one of those terms that is ambiguous; much like “Cloud” or “DevOps”? What do those terms mean? Even folks in the industry can’t agree on a definition. Hopefully I can clean some things up with this post.

Introducing Fog-Rackspace

If you’re a Rubyist and also deal with the cloud, you’ve likely heard of the Fog gem. It’s a great bit of code that refines cloud infrastructure chores between providers and presents a unified interface.

Rackspace and Family

On 9/25/14 I was hired by Rackspace.com.

On 10/10/14 I was part of the family.

What’s the difference? What kind of lip-service is “family” in a corporate environment?

Honor Flight

Recently I had the honor of participating in an Honor Flight and I would love to share my experiences in the hopes that others choose to volunteer their time and efforts. I volunteered because I was never able to say “Thank you” to my Grandfather for his service in WWII. My wife volunteered for the same…

What It Takes

As an educator, user group leader, and senior programmer I’m asked often what it takes to get your foot in the programming door. Recently I received an email and I thought it would be worthwhile to share my response and thoughts.

On Jim

Jim Weirich was a gentle, brilliant man, and the world is a much dimmer place without him.

When I first interviewed at EdgeCase years back I was in awe of him; simply as an outsider being aware of his contributions.

The Importance of Teaching

One of my favorite things to do is to give away all that I know to anyone that will listen.

Re-read that sentence.

In what industry or profession is that true? What other profession approaches beginners with open arms? What other…

The Importance of Community

Back in 2007 I was a lone PHP developer sitting in my office, heads down and plugging away. I went to an unmentioned PHP conference that year by myself and attempted to meet some people in their community. While I met a few nice people, the people that really impressed me were…