Brennen Bearnes
My name is Brennen. I make software. From 2007 to 2014, I worked at
SparkFun Electronics, an online electronics retailer which has
helped to redefine the hobby electronics market, technology education, and open
source hardware. Between 2014 and early 2019, I worked for Adafruit
Industries in multiple roles, and did a stint as a technical writer
for DigitalOcean. At Adafruit I wrote customer-facing educational
materials, worked on the in-house webdev team, and eventually landed as a
Creative Engineer with a focus on the Raspberry Pi, CircuitPython,
and adjacent projects.
At this writing, I’m a member of the Release Engineering team at the Wikimedia
Foundation.
In the rest of my time, I write — about culture, the
landscape, and technology. I travel, often to concerts and festivals.
Sometimes I take pictures. I build things, ride my
bike, and spend a lot of time in tents.
Employment
Software Engineer, Wikimedia Foundation (Remote)
February 2019–Present
- Work on development environments, continuous integration, and deployments.
Contract Work (Remote)
December 2014–January 2019
- Adafruit Industries
- Hardware testing, library development, documentation, and community support for
CircuitPython and the Blinka CircuitPython-compatibility layer on Linux systems.
- Operations and web development for retail site built on PHP, MySQL, and Nginx. Management
of developer tooling and platforms including Vagrant, Ansible, AWS, and DigitalOcean.
- Tutorial content and
demo project development, covering
the GNU/Linux 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 custom ERP system during growth from
$7 million in revenue and 45 employees to $32 million in revenue and 150+
employees.
- Collaboratively built a team of 12 developers, operations specialists, and data
analysts.
- Managed development team, coordinated work with ops and data specialists.
- Modernized development process to include version control, issue tracking,
formal code review, automated testing, and automated deployment.
- Collaborated extensively with marketing, engineering, education, customer
service, tech support, shipping, inventory, production, and finance departments.
- Architected a stack and toolset built on Linux, nginx, PHP, MySQL, PostgreSQL,
Node.js, and MongoDB.
- Built SparkLib, a lightweight PHP application framework including
MVC and ORM components.
- Guided company policy on community management, user privacy, digital civil
liberties issues, and open software and hardware.
Content Expert / Developer, Home & Abroad
May 2006–August 2007
- Researcher and writer for web-based travel guide.
- Web development, in-house utility software, office technical support.
Shipping & Receiving, Sun Microsystems
September 2005–January 2006
Acquisitions Assistant, University of Nebraska Press
Fall 2004
- Evaluated book proposals and manuscripts, coordinated peer review process.
- Helped authors through acquisition and preproduction of work.
- Handled text and image permissions.
Ongoing Projects
- 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.
- Thereminus Rex, a cartoon dinosaur pseudo-Theremin (in collaboration with Toni Klopfenstein).
- userland, a book about the command line for humans.
- wrt, a writing-focused static site generator.
Education
University of Nebraska-Lincoln
- Bachelor of Arts in History