At the end of April, I flew out to Seattle to give a talk at BibleTech, a conference hosted by Faithlife (the company that owns Logos Bible Software). What I found was not only a bunch of interesting content—though there was certainly plenty of that, and props to the Logos/Faithlife people for putting on a great event—but also an awful lot of people a lot like me.

Those of you who know me well know this is rare. Finding people who share one of my primary interests and approach it the same way I do is relatively rare. Finding people who share an interest is not especially hard, but that qualification is extraordinarily important: I know lots of people interested in programming, and lots of people interested in theology, and not many at all who approach either the same way I do. Finding people who are interested in both software and theology (still less also music and linguistics and so on) has been so rare as to be a point of quiet but significant and ongoing frustration in my life.

And then I went to BibleTech, and met a lot of amazing people.

I was reflecting on the experience today—thinking about why I’ve so deeply enjoyed not only the conference itself but the community that has sprung out of it—I realized: These are my people. They share a passion for software development, theology, linguistics, and in many cases even music. There may not be many of us in the world, but a substantial number were assembled in Seattle April 30–May 1, 2015. That’s no small thing.

I have no idea what the future holds for me—whether it will continue to include writing software for the Bible specifically or not—but I can say that this phase of my life has been enormously beneficial in this one way if in no others. It is nice to find kindred spirits in the world, and to know that, even if I am pretty strange, there are other strange people out there, too, and that we can keep working in our strange ways to make the Word of God more available and more useful to people every day.

Good work, BibleTech.