Brian Muenzenmeyer
I excel at building communities and creating useful, intuitive, and delightful tools for others. I’m a T-shaped quick-learner that wears many hats and multitasks with high initiative. Watch me debug a transient dependency collision, mentor junior engineers on mocking within tests, stand up a GitHub Action workflow, plan the next sprint, consult on OSS licenses, and sell a concept to the C-Suite or a batch of interns, all in the same day.
Here's some things keeping me engaged lately.
My brief book about the open source movement!
“I've written this book as a new entry in the compendium of open source thought. I don't fancy myself a thought-leader and for that we are all fortunate. But it is informed by years of success and failure working with open source software. The advice is honest; the vision bold; the mandate modest.”Shop paperback, ebook, or bundled formats
Maintainer, nodejs.org
“It's been exciting maintaining to the nodejs.org website. It's an intersection of technology, legacy choices, market forces, language, and people. Playing part-engineer, part-traffic cop through it all is rewarding and humbling.”Read the blog post about our redesign
Watch a talk I gave about it
Bio
Short
Brian is a multifaceted community leader, engineer, and bald guy. He maintains the Node.js website. He wrote
Approachable Open Source. Give it a read.
Medium
Brian is a Principal Engineer active in the open source community. A father of four boys, he juggles roles like developer, bald curmudgeon, and coffee drinker. Brian maintains the Node.js website, organizes Grace Hopper hackathons, and is published in top web design outlets and podcasts. He wrote
Approachable Open Source, the missing manual for newcomers and veterans alike. He and his wife Megan run a small business rooted in warranty-voiding laser maintenance. He enjoys woodworking,
soccer, milkshakes, and pickleball. Open source has opened countless doors for him—and it can for you, too!
Long
Brian lives in Chanhassen, Minnesota but hails from Manitowoc, where it was always cooler by the lake and is now a fantastic ice-breaker at parties. He has four boys that keep him bald. He does a little of everything, and prefers it that way. Sometimes that’s called being a unicorn 🦄, duck 🦆, or a jack-of-all-trades 🧰, but he likes to land on the Seussical-form—Sneelock of the Circus 🎪!
With a career spanning many roles, from developer, UX team of one, product manager, analyst, and freelancer, Brian brings an experienced and broad approach to many disciplines. He and his wife Megan’s small business keeps them exhausted and grounded in customer delivery, innovation, and warrantee-voiding laser maintenance. He’s been published in Smashing Magazine, CSS-Tricks, Shop Talk Show, Sustain, and led workshops at Web Design Day and the Node.js Collaborator Summit. He maintains the Node.js website, and has organized consecutive Grace Hopper hackathons towards first contributions from attendees. Open source software threads into many aspects of his life, and has opened doors he’d never thought imaginable. It can do that for you too. Much of this culminated in the writing of
Approachable Open Source. Give it a read.
When not writing or working within open source software, Brian lives out programming tropes of drinking coffee and woodworking. He enjoys
soccer, playing games with his sons, especially X-Wing or Chess, and never turns down a milkshake. Him and Megan spend as much time outside as they can muster, often playing with their kids, deepening the pickleball rivalry on their makeshift court, chasing clouds, or digging up the yard.