I am Colin Dean, a software engineer and community builder who uses technology to unite people and help them discover the answers to their questions through meaningful and delightful interactions.
I speak at conferences and have run conferences and conventions since 2002 and non-profits since 2005. You can read more about me at my website, cad.cx.
I prefer to engage in English. It's OK to ask me to repeat myself because my Pittsburghese accent sometimes gets in the way. As of 2024, I have been a student of Esperanto since 2003 and Dutch since 2023, in order of familiarity. I've learned bits of some others 1.
Code & Supply (gitlab & github), Pittsburgh's premiere community of software professionals that hosts meetups and conferences like Abstractions and Heartifacts. We ran a co-working and community space oriented toward software folks from 2017–2025.
Code & Supply Scholarship Fund (gitlab), a non-profit that helps folks attend and speak at conferences in Pittsburgh and beyond.
Homebrew (github), the missing package manager for macOS (and Linux).
Community Internet Solutions (neé Meta Mesh Wireless Communities) (github), a Pittsburgh-based non-profit bridging the digital divide by bringing Internet connectivity to those without it. RIP 2012–2024.
- Support free and low-cost software community events in Pittsburgh and a great hyperlocal compensation survey effort by joining C&S to keep the lights on as an individual or sponsor us as a business hiring or selling to software professionals.
- Remove money as a barrier to attending tech conferences by donating to CSSF to fund tech conference travel grants as an individual, corporation, or foundation.
- Deliver up-to-date software safely and securely to macOS and Linux developers worldwide by donating to Homebrew to help keep packages flowing, esp. if you're a company with a budget and you use Macs or non-root Linux clusters for development
You could also sponsor me on GitHub sponsors. I'll put the money toward one of these or several other organizations I care about.
Cheers!
I keep some projects here on GitHub and some on GitLab. I might have something on Sourcehut or Pijul Nest with old stuff on BitBucket and really old stuff from my early development days on Launchpad.
Footnotes
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I was nearly fluent in Latin, having studied 1998–2007. I have some knowledge of Spanish, French, and Portuguese, mostly thanks to Duolingo or high school language classes, but not enough to converse. ↩