Who Do I Think I Am?
Husband, dad, friend, brother, son, uncle, cousin; programmer, martial artist, teacher, downhill skier, and thinker. I used to write and publish a lot of prose here back when I was a lot more sure the world needed to hear what I was thinking. I write a fair bit of code: github.com/dobbs. I sometimes microblog: rls.social/@dobbs. I used to tweet: @dobbs. In the early 2000s, I contributed to the Turbine project at the Apache Software Foundation: committers.
My career has turned towards learning from incidents in complex software systems.
I am a systems adventurer and a resilience engineer.
I am one of the federated wiki core contributors. I study Ward Cunningham's practices like I study aikido shihan. I watch closely how they work and then copy what I can see to gradually build skills of my own. I have, among other things, created several wiki plugins, experimented widely with ways of hosting wiki servers, and used wiki pages as a database for a single-page javascript applications. I started the Graphviz Plugin and then collaborated with Ward as he added a small programming language to it. I created the Frame Plugin and especilly the protocol that lets HTML scripts and wiki pages communicate. I added HTML5 to the video plugin. I got calendar plugin to share values with method plugin. My main wiki is hosted in digital ocean via docker compose: github. I used to run a wiki on my laptop using kubernetes: github. I extended Nick Neimier's work to get wiki running in glitch: wiki-wiki.glitch.me. I also have a few wikis running in github pages: wander.dbbs.co.
Eric Dobbs can also introduce himself in the third person, in case you need that.
Eric Dobbs is a principal incident analyst. A self-taught programmer, he's been writing code recreationally for over four decades and professionally for three. He has also practiced aikido for over three decades and taught for two of those. His career has meandered through education, consultancies, government, non-profit, and businesses from startup size to Internet scale. He started deliberately practicing learning from incidents in 2018 as part of the SNAFUcatchers consortium. He holds a bachelor's degree in environmental design from the University of Colorado and a fourth-degree black belt from Boulder Aikikai.