Hi, I’m Dylan Thomas 👋 1. I’m a geographer by training, a technologist and program leader by profession, and a (slow) cyclist by nature. I enjoy working on my open source projects CalcMark, GitHub Velocity, and Recipes4.me.
People first and then the machines #
Skip to my resume (PDF) if you just need a rundown of my career, or check out examples of my work.
I’ve coded for money, but I’m really all about using any technology2 to solve problems. I really like to start with the people and eventually get to the machines. If you’re not solving a problem for somebody or some class of people, you’re not doing it right. There are probably exceptions to that principle, but I find it’s a good place to start.
I’ve also learned that working in the open by default is a superpower both individually and collectively. Working at GitHub—the home of open source software—was a revelation in that regard (hat tip to Ben). It confirmed my fundamental belief that writing things down as publicly as possible is a game changer.
Learning My Way Through a Career #
I am an incurable and curious tinkerer, which I believe is a strength in my work. The ability and desire to learn got me from being a geographer in both the UK and the USA to things as varied as:
- Sales engineering with Esri
- Consulting software developer with municipal utilities
- Building social features into MSN and Bing
- Starting Google Maps customer success
- Launching Android Auto in 70M vehicles
- Building a Cloud consulting product and practice
- Leading the TPM team at GitHub through major product and platform shifts.
- Having a life by taking two sabbaticals as Head of DadOps for my family.
- Creating repeatable solutions to recurring operational and team friction:
Again, my resume / C.V. has all the details.
Other Stuff #
I love to cook and have a collection of recipes 🍳. You’re welcome.
Selected Writing #
- gh-velocity: flow metrics for work in GitHub — I built a GitHub CLI extension for engineering flow metrics. Here’s the philosophy behind it, and two stories about what went wrong.
- Building the 'Jobs For Me' Agent — What I learned building an AI job search agent as a Claude Work plugin in three days—and why I open-sourced it instead of selling it.
- Building a language in Go — What I learned building CalcMark — a calculation language embedded in markdown — in Go. Lexers, parsers, type systems, and the tradeoffs that bit me.
- Compound engineering — How I used compound engineering to build a real product as a solo developer. Not “look how many commits I made” but “look at the quality and speed of issue resolution.” The …
- TPM Journey at Github — Slides and recording of my presentation about how technical program management (TPM) came about at GitHub. All in context of Tuckman’s model of group development.
Get In Touch #
Follow the various links below to connect👇. A LinkedIn message is a good start.
My actual name is Dominic Thomas, but Dylan is a poetry-related nickname that I’ve had since I was a teen (Dylan Thomas being a famous Welsh poet). I’ve been known to read a bit during seasonal social events at work ↩︎
My proudest early moment in the 1990s was piping a 60MB file through a
sedcommand. It worked so darn fast that I spent 20 minutes trying to figure out what has gone ‘wrong’ 😅 ↩︎