Fine, who are you?
Hi! I'm Scotty. Pleased to meet you. I've been doing this for a long time.
2000-2003
SEATTLE It was the height of the dot com bubble. There was this crazy utopian vibe shaking the city, it was intoxicating and I couldn't help but dip my toes in the water to see what the fuss was about. After some digging around, I learned a little server magic. PHP was my gateway drug. After that things escalated: Java, Ruby, Python, C, Lua, Haskell, and more soon followed.
In 2002 I started twelvestone, a forum for designers and developers. At its height, there were around 10k active users. It had many incarnations: an old vBulletin setup, two different custom Rails forums, and now it exists as a small Discord channel. There's probably a metaphor in there about the evolution of the web, but I'm not going to dig too deep.
2003-2008
SYDNEY, AUSTRALIA In '03/04 the Ruby users group was also the Smalltalk users group on account of there not being enough of either camp to hold a proper meetup. Ruby was not a popular language back then. Times have sure changed, huh?
In 2006 I co-founded Snepo with two workmates. We built amazing stuff: A Lua-based kiosk platform with hundreds of installations--touch screens before the word "haptic" was used in polite conversation. A massively parallel video encoding server written in Erlang. A document database with a REST API written in Haskell in 2006. And, of course, lots of Rails.
2008-now
NEW YORK I sold my third of Snepo and moved back to the US where I consulted for Gucci, Indaba Music, Gin Lane, WebMD, Stella Service, Candid,
and a ton of others. Was VP Engineering for a startup called Plyfe. Built an MVP dating app called Hey Foxy that got up to about 3k MAUs before I shelved it for other reasons. Lots of good times.
So now it's 2022.
I still spend my time building interesting stuff and helping smart people be super rad.
Give me a shout, let's get some coffee and get to know each other.
Other stuff
I do other stuff too. I write essays and fiction, some of which you can see at scottyweeks.com. I also engage in some light twittering at @scottyweeks. And, of course, you can feel free to stalk me on github @weeksie if that's your thing.
PFA? Who?
A while back, I was riffing fake energy drink slogans with some friends and came up with: "I feel like my arms are made of pit bulls!" As luck would have it I also needed a name for my S-Corp. Pitbulls For Arms, INC was born. Aside from TD Bank asking me if my business had anything to do with dog fighting, it hasn't been a big deal.