Hey, I'm Kurt.

developer, content creator, devrel manager & formerly incarcerated

Thanks for dropping by! Here's a little bit about what kind of content you can expect from me. I care deeply about prison reform and helping the formerly incarcerated. I also talk about mental health, drug addiction, and neurodiversity. Oh, and once in awhile I write about developer advocacy and software development!

If you only read one post, you should read this one

Distributing Challenge: On Building Highly Engaged Teams

This post is about how unbalanced distribution of challenge across a team can cause productivity to drop. It outlines some of the common team structures you'll encounter and provides a model for how to think about distributing challenge.

Guides

The Developer Advocate's Guide to Addressing Product Friction

Over the last three months, we've been developing a framework at Apollo called DX Audits to help us identify, document, report, and address product friction. It was getting difficult to scale this part of developer advocacy so we came up with a framework and this post covers our experience with it and where we landed on the framework's implementation.

The Developer Advocate's Guide to Getting Buy-In

Getting buy-in as a developer advocate is a unique challenge. We usually are not the owners or even direct contributors to what we're trying to change. Instead, we represent this bizarre ephemeral thing called a "community." In this post, I'll cover what buy-in is, how it applies to developer advocacy, what skills help the most when trying to get buy-in, and the processes I use.

Appearances

Business Insider Article

I had the privilege of sharing my story of incarceration and breaking into tech with Kylie Robison, a journalist for Business Insider focused on developers and their communities, tools, startups, and more.

This former felon has a successful career in tech with stints at Amazon and hot startups — and he wants to teach other ex-cons how to do it too

#AntiracistEconomist Podcast

I had the honor of being a guest on Kim Crayton's podcast where we discussed white privilege, the prison industrial complex, and the issues of mediocre white men in tech.

Tech is Not Neutral, Nor is it Apolitical Intention without Strategy is Chaos Lack of Inclusion is a Risk/Crisis Management Issue ….and lastly and most importantly Prioritize the Most Vulnerable

Learn with Jason x freeCodeCamp Interview

I spoke with long time friend Jason Lengstorf about my journey into tech. The main focus was on applying skills gained from other professions to the tech industry.