ashley williams

i make things for the internet using ruby and javascript. i am familiar with many, if not most, of the frameworks, and prefer to avoid cargo-culting my preferences. pet projects have included playing with the superset of NYC open data, geolocating historical photos from the NYPL, realtime mapping of data from mobile operated smart smoke detectors, and making music with the daily federal treasury statements.

i am always learning. currently i'm learning erlang.

i tend to be an evangelist about the things i care about. i care about open source, i care about user experience, and i care about accessibility.

i like games and neuroscience and math and jokes and derrida. i'm good at abstraction, problem solving, and explaining complex ideas. i'm happiest when i'm teaching people how to make things. i've recently become obsessed with programming language design and it's implications for the pedagogy of programming. yes, you heard right: obsessed.

i help maintain Sinatra (a lightweight ruby framework), particularly the sinatra-recipes documentation project. i've also begun working on angular (a javascript framework), triaging issues and proposing, writing, and merging docs features and issues. i also bounce around to conferences in, around, and outside the country and chat people up about all the things i love. additionally, i am the co-organizer for Papers We Love Boston, where we read and discuss a CS white paper monthly and the co-organizer of BostonJS, where we meet monthly to explore and celebrate topics around JavaScript, as well as host panels for discussing and improving ECMAscript standards.

if you are interested in PL design, building cool things for the web, or want to talk shop about how to teach programming, or how to contribute to open source, i'd be delighted to chat with you.