Gabriel Farrell
May 31st, 2012

Gabriel Farrell Works Here Now

Geoff DiMasi
Founder

Gabriel is a full-stack developer with years of experience helping libraries and nonprofits engineer useful, informative websites.

 

He also enjoys participating in local hackathons, where he has created award-winning apps such as sheltr.org and lgbtrights.me.

 

In 2000 Gabriel was living in San Francisco, working at Whole Foods, wondering what to do with his Religion degree from Carleton College.

 

In an effort to keep alive his high school graduation present, a Toshiba Satellite, he got into Linux. Soon after, he built his first website.

 

In the years following he installed Linux on dozens of machines of all shapes and sizes. He rediscovered the enthusiasm for computers his mother instilled in him as a child. Along the way, he picked up a fair amount of Python know-how. In New York he earned a Master's in Library Science from Pratt Institute while working as a Library Assistant at Columbia University, but he couldn't be kept away from the code. Before moving to Philadelphia, he built a Drupal site for the Center for Ethnomusicology.

For the past 5 years Gabriel has been Drexel University's Library Systems Developer. While there, he maintained the institutional repository, extended the catalog, and led the development of open-source library projects like Kochief. He is a proud member of Code4Lib, an international organization for library technologists, and serves on the editorial committee for the Code4Lib Journal.

 

During those years he also did contract work for small organizations such as Mariposa Co-op, free103point9, and Common Cause Pennsylvania, which took him through Django and into Node.js development. He still thinks Python is the prettier language, but JavaScript has taken ahold of his heart.

Gabriel gets away from the screen by hosting dinner parties at his home in West Philly with his lovely fiancee. He also plays pickup soccer at every opportunity.

Geoff DiMasi
Founder

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