🎩 Hello! Saluton! Salve! Hoi!

I am Colin Dean, a software engineer and community builder who uses technology to unite people and help them discover the answers to their questions through meaningful and delightful interactions.

I speak at conferences and have run conferences and conventions since 2002 and non-profits since 2005. You can read more about me at my website, cad.cx.

Communicating with me

I prefer to engage in English. It's OK to ask me to repeat myself because my Pittsburghese accent sometimes gets in the way.

I have been studying Esperanto since 2003 and Dutch since 2023. As of 2025, I'm lightly conversational in Dutch and ik zal graag om met jou een beetje Nederlands te spreken… in the right context. I've learned bits of some others ¹.

Organizations in which I'm actively involved

Past organizations

• Community Internet Solutions (neé Meta Mesh Wireless Communities) (github), a Pittsburgh-based non-profit bridging the digital divide by bringing Internet connectivity to those without it. RIP 2012–2024.

Want to help me out?

• Support free and low-cost software community events in Pittsburgh and a great hyperlocal compensation survey effort by joining C&S to keep the lights on as an individual or sponsor us as a business hiring or selling to software professionals.
• Remove money as a barrier to attending tech conferences by donating to CSSF to fund tech conference travel grants as an individual, corporation, or foundation.
• Deliver up-to-date software safely and securely to macOS and Linux developers worldwide by donating to Homebrew to help keep packages flowing, esp. if you're a company with a budget and you use Macs or non-root Linux clusters for development

You could also sponsor me on GitHub sponsors. I'll put the money toward one of these or several other organizations I care about.

Cheers!

Me on some social media

Me on other code hosting sites

I keep some projects here on GitHub and some on GitLab. I might have something on Sourcehut or Pijul Nest with old stuff on BitBucket and really old stuff from my early development days on Launchpad.