Robby Russell
CEO, Partner at The Mighty Missoula
Portland, Oregon, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top School
Top expert inModern Software Development and DevOps Practices
Robby Russell is a veteran software leader and founder with 20+ years helping teams modernize and sustain Ruby on Rails applications as CEO and Partner of Planet Argon. He combines strategic leadership with hands-on engineering—creator and long-time maintainer of Oh My Zsh, a widely used open-source zsh framework with thousands of contributors and millions of users. Robby hosts two podcasts (On Rails and Maintainable.fm) that surface practical lessons about maintainability, modernization, and the human side of software. His nontraditional path—from dropping out of high school to self-teaching code and launching community projects—shapes a pragmatic stewardship philosophy: preserve what works, modernize the rest. Beyond tech, he channels creative leadership as a founding guitarist in instrumental rock band The Mighty Missoula and as a long-serving nonprofit board member focused on housing stability.
20 years of coding experience
3 years of employment as a software developer
Dropped Out, Dropped Out at Gilroy High School
English
Stackoverflow
51reputation
5kreached
3answers
0questions
Github Skills (32)
application-framework10
zsh-completion10
wordpress-themes10
scripting10
app-framework10
bash-completion10
script10
sh10
web-framework10
shell10
zsh10
tab-completion10
cli10
completions10
command-line-interface9
Programming languages (7)
Github contributions (5)
ohmyzsh/ohmyzsh
Aug 2009 - Jan 2023
🙃 A delightful community-driven (with 2,400+ contributors) framework for managing your zsh configuration. Includes 300+ optional plugins (rails, git, macOS, hub, docker, homebrew, node, php, python, etc), 140+ themes to spice up your morning, and an auto-update tool that makes it easy to keep up with the latest updates from the community.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:35 reviews, 1373 commits, 752 PRs in 13 years 6 months
Contributions summary:Robby primarily focused on improving the core functionality of the zsh configuration framework. The user's commits demonstrate a consistent effort to refine the installation process, with changes involving proper loading of zsh after installation and modifications to the installation script. Further contributions include adding theme support for prompts, a function for showing command usage statistics, as well as tools for uninstalling and upgrading the zsh framework.
oh-my-zsh-pluginpythonrails-pluginszsh-configurationauto-update
robbyrussell/robbyrussell
Sep 2020 - Feb 2022
My README
Contributions:16 commits, 30 pushes, 1 branch in 1 year 5 months
Find and Hire Top DevelopersWe’ve analyzed the programming source code of over 60 million software developers on GitHub and scored them by 50,000 skills. Sign-up on Prog,AI to search for software developers.