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Welcome to my website. This page is primarily about my work, with a few hobbies thrown in.

Quick bio

Eric is the co-founder of Read the Docs, Write the Docs, and EthicalAds.

His work has historically been around software documentation, but he’s also been actively engaged in community building and open source sustainability for over 15 years.

He currently lives in Bend, Oregon, and love to explore the outdoors, checking out the various beauty that the world holds.

Information

Below you can find out more information about me, and the various professional projects I’m a part of.

Blog Entries

Here are my 10 latest posts:

  • We don’t do that here: Setting social norms - Feb 10, 2023

    I have long been a fan of social rules to make events more inclusive. Ever since I attended my first tech conference, I’ve seen the career-enhancing power of events, but they have never been equally accessible to all people.

  • Using a Welcome Wagon to Help First-Time Conference Attendees - Sep 26, 2019

    You walk into the room and you’re wearing the wrong thing. Everyone else is dressed casually, but you are not. You feel silly and find the quickest excuse to leave the situation. This is an example of a common situation: not knowing what is expected of you when you enter a new place.

  • One Percent for Open Source - Mar 09, 2018

    The open source ecosystem is the most valuable part of the software industry today. From the programming languages to the web frameworks, the operating system to the cryptography, all software companies today use open source.

  • Conference Mentorship - Feb 13, 2018

    I have had the opportunity to provide mentorship to folks who have organized conferences twice in 2017. Through this process I have realized the value in this practice, and I’d like to write this to promote others to do to same for first year conference organizers.

  • The post I never published - Feb 07, 2018

    Looking back, the file was created on my 29th birthday:

  • Business questions I’m working on in 2018 - Jan 04, 2018

    In November 2017 there was a lovely gathering of independent business folks in Portland, Oregon called DazzleCon. Leading in to that lovely event there was an introduction thread where everyone explained their business. It caused me to really think deeply about the problems facing my two fledging but promising communities, and I wanted to record my answers here publicly.

  • Breaking Cliques at Events: The Snowball Rule - Dec 02, 2017

    I’ve been going to professional events for a number of years, and one of the trickiest dynamics I have seen is that most events develop an “insiders” group who has been going for a long time. These groups tend to feel like exclusionary cliques for first-time attendees, and actively hurt the community’s goal of inclusion.

  • The Pac-Man Rule at Conferences - Aug 02, 2017

    I firmly believe that conferences can provide a lot of value for people in an industry. Conferences allow people to create a network, which helps them feel integrated in a community and profession.

  • Documentation is JSON for the Brain - Feb 13, 2017

    When you are writing software, you build a mental model of the program in your brain. This is how you make decisions and reason about how the program might work, how data flows, or what designs make the most sense.

  • “My Code is Self-Documenting” - Jan 27, 2017

    Self-documenting code is one of the biggest documentation myths in the software industry. This view generally conflates documentation with code comments. I’d like to make two arguments in this post:

See all blog entries ➡