Shy Ruparel

Shy Ruparel is a senior developer advocate at Temporal, an organizer of developer communities and a builder of playful hardware projects. His work combines teaching with software and devices that other developers can inspect and modify, from an e-ink vaccination display to an open-source wearable computer.

His career in developer relations has included developer evangelism at Contentful and Superblocks and senior developer advocacy at Docker. He has also served as deputy commissioner of Major League Hacking and as a board member and managing director of hackNY.

In 2019, he and Tierney Cyren started Adulting.Dev, a one-day conference for developers early in their careers and the managers and team leads supporting them. Its program focused on making room for learning, mental health and work-life balance, alongside practical conversations about feedback, raises and progressing beyond junior roles.

A vaccination display built with Docker

For his first project at Docker in 2022, Ruparel built Docker-MagTag-OWID, which displayed Our World in Data’s COVID-19 vaccination figures on an Adafruit MagTag’s e-ink screen. The dataset’s 34 MB JSON file was too large for the device to process. He put a Python service on a Raspberry Pi between the dataset and the display: the Pi fetched the data, extracted the requested country’s latest figures and returned a response measured in kilobytes. Using Docker, he built an Armv7 container image on his MacBook and deployed it to the Pi. He published the code and setup instructions so others could reproduce the project.

Building the Replay badge

At Temporal, Ruparel worked with hardware consultants, designers and manufacturing partners to build the Replay 2026 badge, a wearable computer with games, infrared contact exchange and support for users to write their own applications. Alongside the firmware, the software running on the device, he developed tools that let colleagues prepare thousands of units for use.

• Learning firmware with AI. Ruparel used Claude, Claude Code and later Codex for work he had never done professionally. He made architectural decisions, used tests to check generated code and reviewed recordings of interface tests. That changed his testing habits: he had usually skipped tests when coding without AI, but needed extensive coverage to trust generated implementations. He credits AI with making the project possible and says more than a decade of development experience helped him recognize mistakes and challenge weak decisions.

• Ignition: a workflow for every device. Ruparel developed Ignition with colleagues to install firmware on 2,300 badges, including 300 spares. It tracked each 32-device batch and gave every badge its own Temporal workflow to record progress, retry failed operations and check that the expected firmware actually booted before declaring success. Six laptops ran independent local Temporal servers, so a failed station could be replaced while the others kept working. Edward Amsden fixed recognition of badges whose factory test firmware made them reappear under different USB identities after a reset. More than 70 colleagues helped assemble the devices and install their firmware.

• Applications without rebuilding the firmware. Ruparel wanted owners to keep using and changing the badge after Replay. The team’s C++ and MicroPython architecture kept timing-sensitive hardware, storage and recovery in the C++ runtime, while MicroPython gave app authors Python functions for screens, inputs and sensors. That let people write games and tools without rebuilding the device’s firmware. The team published firmware, hardware design files, flashing tools and a community-app registry so owners could inspect, repair and extend the device, including making their own infrared remotes.