Brennen Bearnes

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

From 2007 to 2014, I worked at SparkFun Electronics, an electronics retailer which has helped to redefine the hobby electronics market, technology education, and open source hardware. Between 2014 and 2019, I contracted for Adafruit Industries and did a stint as a technical writer for DigitalOcean. At Adafruit I wrote educational materials, worked on the in-house webdev team, and eventually landed as a Creative Engineer with a focus on the Raspberry Pi and CircuitPython.

Employment

Software Engineer, Wikimedia Foundation (Remote)

February 2019–Present

• Deployment of the MediaWiki instances that run Wikipedia and associated projects
• MediaWiki development environment tooling
• Continuous integration, code review, and deployment tooling for the Wikimedia technical community
• Implementation of GitLab for code review and continuous integration
• Deployment training and documentation

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 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 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.

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.
• userland, a book about the command line for humans.
• wrt, a writing-focused static site generator.
• Maintenance and support for VimWiki, a personal wiki for Vim.

Education

University of Nebraska-Lincoln

• Bachelor of Arts in History