Welcome in! I’m Ross Chapman. A software engineer, kung fu instructor, activist, and writer. 👋🏻

Professional

For over 10 years I’ve written commercial software across industries and sectors: a scientific research outsourcing marketplace, popular event management ticketing software, industrial pharmacy warehouse software, a fledgling community-driven e-commerce platform, public benefits portals for major US cities, and a global community narrative archive. That’s on purpose. The freedom to drift toward compelling socio-technical problems were big attractions for building a livelihood as a coder. (That mixed with a dash of retrograde desire to join alternative hacker fantasies. )

Let’s build something! I’m seeking out people and organizations that learn together, are competent in or working toward shared theory building, and have repositories accumulating code on the boring side. I’m driven to show up for customers while also facilitating joyful, trust-based collaboration amongst my fellow devs. And I’m eager to leverage training in feminist and human-rights centered technology design, nonviolent communication, and facilitation toward those goals.

Software is my profession, but I find the phenomenon of software development mesmerizing on a philosophical level all its own. When we work together you’ll find I bring a natural wonder and curiosity about the socio-technical software system that combines humans, code, organizational and business constraints, hardware. This world-building and its attendant exasperations, moments of failure, bug fixing, and problem solving really fills my cup. Federica Frabetti attempts to describe our trade’s endeavor in her 2015 book Software Theory by Tracing the ontological crisis of software which constantly “undoes itself”. She offers:

There is no general approach to software than can establish once and forever how software works.

Wild! There’s more.

Moving

When I’m not writing software, I’m wiggling as much as possible. For over 15 years I’ve been practicing and teaching an Indonesian-based White Crane Kun Tao silat (kung fu). I find the ancient forms and natural movements thrilling, and am inspired by the ongoing evolution of practice and what it can offer contemporary bodies that don’t get much chance to flex, stretch, balance, roll, slide, and fill deeply with oxygen. (Of course, the deepest secrets only to be revealed by a true master, my tuxedo cat-son Banzo.) Let’s move!