Name: Wesley Beary
Bio: Geemus (Wesley Beary) [http://github.com/geemus] is an avid Rubyist, Open Sourcer and Herokai. He spends his days improving developer experience at Heroku and spends his free time working on fog [http://github.com/geemus/fog], developing games, prototyping world domination schemes, and hacking his health.
Title: Hacker Laureate, Heroku
Thanks to our sponsor
Age: 29
Residence: Iowa City, Iowa
Website: geemus.com
Twitter: @geemus
Linkedin: linkedin.com/in/geemus
Intro music: “Ventolin,” by Aphex Twin.
Silicon Prairie News: What drove your decision late last year to join Heroku?
Wesley Beary: By that time I had been working almost entirely on fog for over a year. I was quite happy with where that took the project, but the challenge of it and the rate at which I was learning had greatly declined. So I decided to try something new and jumped in the deep end at Heroku so that I could get my growth and learning back on the right track.
SPN: You’ve spoken before on “how you learned to stop worrying and love the cloud.” What was the source of your initial trepidation about the cloud, and what caused you to come around?
WB: Before I started working on fog it already seemed that the writing was on the wall; cloud services were going to be very important to me and my career, yet I knew almost nothing about them. I fought back with research, but this merely led to more trepidation as I found just how many competing options there were to choose from. fog grew from that terror into a repository of both code and cloud knowledge that makes it much more approachable and much less frightening.
SPN: What’s your elevator pitch for fog and why people should give it a try?
WB: Cloud services are hard to choose between and ever harder to get started with after you have decided. fog simplifies this by providing a single interface to learn which can interoperate with many cloud services. This simplifies the learning curve while allowing for arbitrage and greater portability.
SPN: You’ve been working on creating a board/card game for some time. Can you describe the game and your impetus for creating it?
WB: I have been working for a while on an asteroid mining card game I call ISRU. My fascination with video games is largely what drew me to programming, but after some brushes with game programming I decided it was not for me. Eventually I settled on board and card games as a better outlet for this interest. The game is coming along well, and I hope to publish it in the next year. In the meantime I continue to be fascinated by the many parallels between game design and my user experience work
SPN: As a self-described hacker of your own health, what are three of the latest, greatest tech tools you use to help you lead a health life?
WB: I have been using a Zeo for some time to track my sleep patterns and wake me at good parts of my sleep cycle and a Withings wifi scale, which makes it very convenient to track my weight and body fat over time. Much less polished, but more exciting to me are some homegrown tools I’ve been working on. I have one program that helps me time and sequence different stretches for improved flexibility and another that records data from a heart monitor. Both have been rather interesting to develop and enhance, and I hope to do even more interesting things with them in the future.
Credits: Photo courtesy of Beary.
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