Photo of Devin Reams in front of a mountain range

Hi! I’m Devin. I’m sensibly impulsive, consistently non-committal, and passionately impartial. I’m a technologist living in Denver, Colorado.

Remembering Alex King

The following is the remembrance I shared with everyone at Alex’s Celebration of Life service (about his life in Denver) on October 8th, 2015.

The 2015 Monktoberfest

Last week I attended one of my favorite conferences: The Monktoberfest: the developer conference where social meets technology. This was the fifth year and I’ve attended all five. Hats off to my friends, the organizers, for keeping it consistently great.

Lessons learned moving away from home

Rachel and I packed up and spent six months in Portland, Maine this past fall and winter. In case you missed it: we had two opportunities to see a lot of the country we hadn’t before (driving out east and driving back home). We also made the most of a very snowy winter and kept running, skiing, and hiking.

Year in Review: 2014

When looking back on the past year I’ve realized what a fun, crazy, busy and privileged life I lead in 2014. I consider myself very lucky to have the experiences and opportunities I’ve had: I started working for GitHub, Rachel and I enjoyed some great trips together, and we temporarily moved across the country from Denver to Portland, Maine

GitHub Flow Talk at Develop Denver

This past weekend I had the distinct pleasure of speaking at Develop Denver, a local conference for designers and developers in the community. If you’re interested, I posted my slides on Speaker Deck.

Chapter 2: Joining GitHub

Six months ago I joined the impressive team at GitHub. Since I haven’t publicly shared much about my experiences yet I wanted to take the opportunity to reflect on my latest chapter.

Expressions That I Hope Disappear

I’ve recently realized two seemingly harmless expressions may unintentionally continue to shape our thoughts to disenfranchise great groups of individuals.

My First Pull Request

The Pull Request is arguably one of the most powerful features of GitHub. It has changed the way both individuals contribute to open source projects and how organizations build better software together.

This weekend @andrew and @briannelson created a single-serving site, First Pull Request, which shows you, well, your first Pull Request on GitHub.com.

Nearly everyone who I know and searched for has had a fairly substantial, though humerous (in hindsight) request to someone else’s open source project.

Mine, on the other hand is fairly funny and extremely telling:

  1. It’s changes one line of code,
  2. for a client’s website as part of a paid engagement,
  3. …and it was missing a closing HTML tag.

Unfortuately, three years later, the sophisticated nature and technical accuracy of my Pull Requests are unchanged. Luckily, now I’m simply submitting requests internally and not to any customers. :wink:

GitHub Kaigi! See you in Japan!

A group of GitHubbers :octocat:, self included, are headed to Japan :jp: for GitHub Kaigi, a conference organized by the GitHub User Group. This will be my first conference as a GitHubber and I’m excited for the opportunity to meet so many GitHub users and enthusiasts next weekend.

I fly :airplane: out tomorrow morning and arrive in Tokyo on Sunday. @dsorkin, @dice and I will spend next week — before the conference — meeting with GitHub Enterprise customers, gathering feedback, and saying “thanks” as much as we can.

I’ve never visited Japan :japan: before and I’m excited to see Tokyo. I’ll be sure to bring back lot of photos. Is there anything you think I should try to see?

40 maps that explain the Middle East

This is a great series of maps (explaining the Middle East) and really showing what Vox is all about.

I learned quite a bit from it. It may sound silly but it also helped me realize how interrelated the various timelines, histories and events covered in high school really affected the world we have today. Learning “European history” seemed so distant from modern day events but these maps and explanations helped some things “click” back together for me.