Brennen Bearnes

I’m Brennen.

From 2007 to 2014, I worked at SparkFun Electronics, a manufacturer and retailer which helped define the modern hobby electronics market. Between 2014 and 2019, I contracted for Adafruit Industries and did a stint as a technical writer for DigitalOcean.

Since 2019, I’ve been a member of the Release Engineering team at the Wikimedia Foundation. We provide the Wikimedia movement with tools and services to enable software development, deploy the code that runs Wikipedia, and care for the health of Wikimedia production in various ways.

Employment

Software Engineer, Wikimedia Foundation (Remote)

February 2019–Present

• Continuous integration, code review, and deployment systems for the Wikimedia technical community
• Deployment of the MediaWiki instances that run Wikipedia
• MediaWiki local development environments
• Deployment training and documentation
• Implementation of GitLab Community Edition

Contract Work (Remote)

December 2014–January 2019

• Adafruit Industries
  • Library development, hardware testing, documentation, and community support for CircuitPython and the Blinka CircuitPython-compatibility layer on Linux systems.
  • Operations and development for retail site built on PHP, MySQL, and Nginx.
  • Tutorial content and demo project development, covering the command line, shell scripting, Python, and basic electronics.
  • Work on a package repository, system configuration, display hardware support, and kernel cross-compilation for the Raspberry Pi.
• Community tooling for Tympan.org, an open source hearing aid project.

Technical Writer, DigitalOcean (Remote)

October 2015–June 2016

• Authored tutorials on Unix and Linux system administration topics including package management, init systems, MySQL, PHP, Apache, Nginx, Ubuntu, CentOS, CoreOS, various APIs, and general best practices.

Lead Developer, SparkFun Electronics

November 2007–November 2014

• Led development of retail site and in-house ERP system during growth from $7 million in revenue and 45 employees to $32 million in revenue and 150+ employees.
• Architected a stack built on Linux, nginx, PHP, MySQL, PostgreSQL, Node.js, and MongoDB.
• Built SparkLib, a lightweight application framework and ORM.
• Managed development team, coordinated work with ops and data specialists.
• Collaborated with marketing, engineering, education, customer service, tech support, shipping, inventory, production, and finance departments.
• Guided company policy on community management, user privacy, and open software and hardware.

Ongoing Projects

• Maintenance and support of VimWiki, a personal wiki for Vim.
• userland, a book about the command line for humans.
• bpb-kit, a tangled mass of dotfiles and personal utilities.
• p1k3, a personal weblog, 1997–present.
• squiggle.city, a shared shell server and web host in the spirit of tilde.club.
• wrt, a writing-focused static site generator.

Education

University of Nebraska-Lincoln

• Bachelor of Arts in History