Jo[h]n Hope

Contact Info

Locations (current)Belfast, Dublin
Twitter @midhir
GitLab @johnhope
GitHub JonMidhir
Email me@jhope.ie

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

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

2010

PG Dip. New Venture Creation (with Commendation)

Queen's University Management School, Belfast
2009

MA Sonic Arts (with Commendation)

Queen's University, Belfast

Final Project:
Software for Editing Audio in the Web Browser; including sharing, version control and a Ruby wrapper for the SoX library.

Specialisation:
Computer Programming for Audio Applications, Composition.

2008

BSc Music Technology (First Class Honours)

Queen's University, Belfast

Final Project:
Web‐based, social network and directory for composers.

Specialisation:
Computer Programming for Audio Applications, Composition.