VM Brasseur
Founder, shoeless consulting

Website | @vmbrasseur | Attendee Directory Profile

My name is VM Brasseur. I am based in San Francisco, CA. You may call me ‘VM’ or ‘V’ or ‘Veem’ or ‘Veeb’ or even ‘Vicky,’ which is the short form of my given name of ‘Victoria’ and is, in truth, the name by which most friends and co-workers know me. However I answer to all of the above. TIMTOWTDI, after all.

My introduction to Open Source was watching a college boyfriend fill countless 3.5” floppy discs with a new operating system he was downloading from Usenet over his shiny new 14.4K baud modem. “It’s, ya know, like UNIX. But, ya know, free.” Somehow this made a deep impression. I started paying attention and recognized that openness is a Good Thing™. Since then openness of all sorts has been a feature of my life, often in small but meaningful ways.

As of 2011 I am in my twelfth year as a manager of technical people, projects, processes and products. My professional interests lie in technical management, free/open source software, open access, libraries/archives, technical writing, user-centric software development and a fair smattering of business and marketing (which is not evil, despite what we techies would like to think). While I have been a programmer and can read and understand most programming languages with little trouble I have no interest in generating code. Frankly, while it’s something I can do it is not something which I feel I should do (or, more specifically, be allowed to do). We all have our strengths. Mine is helping technical people do good things and do them well. In the very rare event I do code something it will be written in Perl, for which I have a very soft spot in my heart.

When not working I make things, dote on my spoiled cats Nigel and Percy, and obsess about Doctor Who.