I’m Caleb: a dreamer, speaker, and computer whisperer. I organized the Keep Ruby Weird conference, which of course you’ve heard of and are very impressed by, for four years. When I’m not painting miniatures or climbing cliffs to jump off into the water, I work for Heroku and code in Ruby and Go. I’ve walked barefoot from the wintry tundra of Alaska to the harsh deserts of Arizona. Okay, that’s not true, but I did live in those places. I currently hail from Austin, TX—the taco capital of the United States.
In 2011, with a team of interns at a Department of Defense contractor, I created a Wi-Fi geolocation app to locate hotspots. It could find the location in 3D space of every hotspot near you in seconds. We made formulas to model signal strength and probable distances. We used machine learning to optimize completion time and accuracy.
I was so caught up in the details that it took me months to see it would be used to kill people. What do we do when we discover that we’re building something immoral or unethical? How can we think through the uses of our software to avoid this problem entirely?
| How I Built Software to Kill People | PyCaribbean 2018 | February 2018 |
|---|---|---|
| Sorting Rubyists | RailsConf 2017 | April 2017 |
| Sorting Rubyists | MagmaConf 2017 | March 2017 |
| The Joy of Miniature Painting | Abstractions | August 2016 |
| Multi-table Full Text Search in Postgres | RailsConf 2016 | May 2016 |
| What is this PGP thing, and how can I use it? | RailsConf 2015 | April 2015 |
| Multi-table Full Text Search in Postgres | RubyConf Portugal 2014 | October 2014 |
| Not Invented Here: Things Rails Didn't Innovate | Scottish Ruby Conf 2014 | May 2014 |
for free. You
can too.
