About
I'm Gerald. I build software and the teams that ship it, and on weekends I make things out of wood, filament and whatever fits under the laser.
- Drawn by
- Gerald Onyango
- Trade
- Engineer, leader, maker
- Sheet
- 5 of 5
This is my origin story. I've always loved making things. As a kid I built houses and buildings out of cardboard, lit inside with AA batteries and the bulbs from flashlights. Around the same time I started writing HTML. That's a bit of a leap, I know, but it says who I am: I love being a maker, digitally, physically and metaphorically (friendships!). That, and a fascination with the universe we live in, has shaped how I've spent my time from when I was a kid until now.
I learned HTML and then Visual Basic around the age of 12, and spent years making GeoCities sites for my hobbies before PHP and MySQL took off and I started getting paid for website work as a teenager. At 16 I passed my CompTIA A+ certification and got an after-school job at a local computer shop, fixing and building machines. From there my curiosity took me through networking, hardware and software, across telecom, startups and large corporations, and across frontend, backend, mobile with React Native, and platforms, including enterprise applications and APIs at massive scale. The one constant has been a love of learning and making.
I built first versions of products with New York startups, which is where I learned that "done" is a conversation, not a commit. At Netlify I was an early engineer and started the internal tools team: sales and product teams got a safe app and Slack bot for the changes they used to ask engineers to make, with manager approval for anything sensitive and a full audit trail.
As my career went on, I kept ending up in leadership roles, so I leaned into it. It started small: being the reliable expert a team could lean on, then forming small, focused engineering teams. Then came bigger roles: building and leading large teams at large organizations, mentoring managers, and running several cross-disciplinary teams at once. At GitHub I led 15 to 20 engineers across the pull request experience and the new merge box, and was the accessibility lead. I love building and enabling people. Management gave me the room to build teams where people do their best work, grow and reach business goals together, while I still get to nerd out on the technical side with them. Along the way I've done technical and leadership consulting, and agency work helping new startups get their ideas off the ground.
Then, of course, the world changed. AI may be the buzzword of the decade. I'd worked with neural networks before, but it was LLMs becoming a commodity that really got me building AI technology, and building with it. I've made pipelines, integrations into existing applications, greenfield AI-first products, and platforms with custom agents, vector databases, tools, CLIs and models. Managing an AI Engines team at GitHub is where I learned the most about what it takes to build both with AI and on top of it.
With that experience I started making my own plugins, skills and workflows that help engineers and product managers get more done with AI on their own machines. On top of open source I've built internal services and a code review tool that learns from thousands of past human reviews in the same repositories, to raise the quality of what ships and ease the review bottleneck that appears when AI can generate near-infinite code. Two you can look at: a Claude plugin that gathers open-source skills alongside ones I wrote, and my fork of OpenWhispr, which now runs its models, processing and speaker diarization locally, keeps meeting notes in vector storage for semantic search, and has an MCP server so your LLM can pull up your notes.
It all comes full circle. In my free time I build decks, sheds, closets, stairs and a kitchen island, design for 3D printing and laser engraving, and hack in new languages like Odin while working on open-source projects. The kitchen island is my favorite: a labor of love, with storage and seating, and the whole family uses it every day. The stairs were humbling. It was my first time rehabbing old steps, the old treads, risers and walls weren't even, and a few early decisions ruled out what I wanted to do later without recutting every tread. I learned a lot. The rest of my time goes to my wife and kids, and the gaps in between go to good books and making things.
I write here about shipping software with less drama, leading engineers, building with AI, and whatever's on the bench. The monthly letter is the easiest way to keep up. If you'd like help with your team, here's how I work. Or just say hi at ping@gerald.dev. Either way, keep making.
