Jo[h]n Hope

Contact Info

Interests

I started programming at about 11 years old with a book called Programming Microcomputers and a Commodore 64.

Currently, I work for GitLab as an Engineering Manager on the Plan team.

Previously I enjoyed growing and leading the engineering team at Storyful, a journalism technology company and News Corp subsidiary, as Principal Developer. I also worked in mobile games development, probably most notably on Transformers 3.

I started working with Ruby over 10 years ago, about the time of Rails v1.2. It's still the language I love and reach for most often; though I'm really interested in Haskell and Elixir and have written production code in Javascript and Objective-C too.

I love music and founded Midhir Records while at college. We pressed music by unique artists onto vinyl and CD and promoted it around the world, while distributing interesting music from other labels here in Ireland. It was a crash course in everything from supply chain management to retail economics and it was a blast. Around this time I also released an album in China with my own band Altus Astrum.

Other than that I love books, fitness and good food.

Projects

• ShiftDock: I co-founded the company, led the product development and helped raise seed finance (inc. IntertradeIreland Seedcorn NI Award 2012).
• TF3 Battlezone: Android, iOS & Facebook game for the third installment of the Transformers^® franchise. I built the server application (Ruby).
• Redcrumbs (gem): Fast activity tracking for Rails using Redis.
• Open Source: Recent contributions to HTTParty, Sinatra, Timecop & more; most contributions available to view on Github.
• Midhir Records: Record label and mail‐order. We signed four incredible artists and secured retail & independent distribution all over the world. I founded and ran the label between 2004 – 2009.

Writing

Storyful/Unruly Developer Exchange.

1. How a Week at Another Company Helped Us Refresh Our Culture.
   [Medium, May 2018]

Tactics for Taming Legacy Code, April 2016.

1. Slides from the talk at Ruby Ireland.

Rails: Building a single‐page Backbone app without sacrificing Turbolinks.

1. Dealing with conflicting use of the browser history.

2. Avoiding the zombie encroachment, or managing memory without a page change.

Citations

1. How Storyful is turning Slack into an extension of its newswire.
   [Nieman Lab, Nov 2015]

Education