About Me

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.

a headshot showing Dylan in an office environment

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:

Along the way, I’ve also taken two sabbaticals as Head of DadOps for my family and built open source tools aligned with my interests—CalcMark, GH Velocity, Jobs4Me. Again, my resume / C.V. and my work have all the details.

Other Stuff #

I love to cook and have a collection of recipes 🍳. You’re welcome.

Selected Writing #

  • Bookend agents for product quality — Claude kept apologizing for skipping my expectation-based testing rules…and then skipping then again 2 minutes later. This is how I replaced best-effort written instructions with two …
  • 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.
  • 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.

  1. 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 ↩︎

  2. My proudest early moment in the 1990s was piping a 60MB file through a sed command. It worked so darn fast that I spent 20 minutes trying to figure out what has gone ‘wrong’ 😅 ↩︎


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