Richard Littauer
Community Organizer at Burnt Fen Creative
Wellington, Wellington, New Zealand
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolRichard Littauer is an open source community organizer and developer with 14 years of experience building healthy contributor ecosystems, running a consultancy (Burnt Fen Creative), and helping institutions stand up OSPOs. He blends hands-on technical work — from writing tests and front-end tweaks to improving CLIs and README standards across projects like nock, ipfs/kubo, and the widely referenced standard-readme — with deep documentation and tooling expertise. A proven community builder, he has led programs at Protocol Labs, Open Source Collective, and SustainOSS, and served as interim Executive Director of the GNOME Foundation. Trained as a linguist and PhD candidate in computer science, he brings rare cross-disciplinary strengths: language design, technical writing, developer tooling, and creative pursuits (poetry, sailing, birding) that inform empathetic community leadership.
14 years of coding experience
11 years of employment as a software developer
Doctor of Philosophy - PhD, Computer Science, Doctor of Philosophy - PhD, Computer Science at Victoria University of WellingtonMaster of Science (MSc), Language and Communication Technologies, Master of Science (MSc), Language and Communication Technologies at Universität des SaarlandesMA (Honours), Linguistics, MA (Honours), Linguistics at The University of EdinburghaltMBAHigh School Diploma, High School Diploma at Kingswood Oxford School
German, Latin, Greek, na'vi, Japanese, English, Spanish, French
Stackoverflow
382reputation
45kreached
6answers
12questions
Github Skills (56)
markdown10
json10
javascript10
expressjs10
bootstrap10
scripting10
sphinx10
testing10
css10
command-line-interface10
http10
standard-js10
git-repository10
ipfs10
standardized10
Programming languages (36)
Github contributions (5)
ipfs/community
Sep 2015 - Apr 2017
Discussion and documentation on community practices
Role in this project:
DevOps Engineer
DevOps EngineerContributions:141 commits, 98 PRs, 118 pushes in 1 year 6 months
Contributions summary:Richard primarily contributed to the project's tooling and automation. They added scripts for setting up Git hooks and updating git repositories. Their work included creating a script to clone repositories for an organization, demonstrating experience with scripting and repository management, and developing tools for applying GitHub labels across multiple repositories. This indicates a focus on improving developer workflow and project maintainability.
nock/nock
Jun 2018 - Jun 2019
HTTP server mocking and expectations library for Node.js
Role in this project:QA Engineer / Test Automation Engineer
QA Engineer / Test Automation EngineerContributions:2 reviews, 65 commits, 51 PRs in 11 months
Contributions summary:Richard primarily focused on writing and modifying tests for the `nock/nock` library, a Node.js HTTP mocking library. Their contributions included adding new test cases for features like reply callbacks, unmocked passthrough, and recording functionality. The user also addressed issues by fixing existing tests, ensuring the library's reliability and functionality. They demonstrate a good understanding of the testing framework.
http-servermockingnodejsmocknock
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