About me

Portrait of Olivier Lacan
Yep, that's me. ⤴

I’ve been building web sites and applications for over 24 years. Over the past 14 years, I’ve evolved into a backend-focused software engineer. I care deeply about creating sustainable software: in the way it’s designed and built, but crucially in the possibilities the software itself enables. I build software for people, most crucially for people who seek to improve our anthropogenically-endangered ecosystem and address climate change today, not tomorrow.

Despite my unescapable Frenchness (Paris-born & raised), my favorite languages are English and Ruby.

I spend most of my time building and maintaining large and small web applications as a Principal Software Engineer.

Work

I was an early member of the platform team that built and maintained Code School between 2012 and 2018. I Code School’s migration into Pluralsight in 2018 after it was acquired. Since then, I’ve developed new hands-on learning experiences (for learners & authors) at Pluralsight, overhauled its content pipeline to make it support unlimited content types, and worked on next-generation multi-modal immersive technology education.

As a technology educator, I’ve written and developed several interactive Code School courses. Most notably, I authored a free [Try Git course][trygit] in collaboration with GitHub to teach the basics of git in 15 minutes. Recently I released a high-level Ruby on Rails course on Pluralsight called Ruby on Rails: The Big Picture.

You can find more about my work here.

Open Source

I’ve contributed to both the Ruby programming language and the Ruby on Rails web development framework.

I also created the Shields metadata badge project which is used by countless open source projects around the world.

In order to provide better guidance to software maintainers on how to communicate about releases, I wrote a set of helpful guidelines and examples in Keep a Changelog which has been translated in over 26 languages by contributors since it was first released in 2015.

Public Speaking

I’ve spoken at multiple conferences around the world on topics like Science-driven Development, contributing to open source, Ruby on Rails, and information security. You can find my published talks here.

In the past, I co-hosted the Ruby5 podcast for several years, created and hosted Ruby Facets and appeared as a guest and panelist in several podcasts.

Get in touch

If you’d like to email me securely you can use my PGP Key (see GPGTools) but email and twitter are fine for most cases.