Joel Hawksley / joel@hawksley.org

Joel standing on a stage next to a projection screen with the GitHub logo. There are about 100 people in the audience"

Now

I’m a staff software engineer at GitHub, focusing on the health of our Ruby on Rails monolith. I also lead development of the ViewComponent framework.

Career

I’ve made several contributions to Rails, including support for 3rd-party component frameworks, a helper for dynamically constructing CSS class names, template path annotations, marking code as uncacheable, and strict locals for templates and partials.

I’ve spoken at RailsConf (2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024), RubyConf, Brighton Ruby, RubyDay IT, RubyConf Taiwan, Rocky Mountain Ruby (2023, 2024, 2025), Boulder Ruby, Ruby Galaxy, ChicagoRuby, NYC.rb, Vancouver Ruby, Toronto Ruby, SF Ruby, Geneva.rb and Open Source Friday.

Podcast appearances: Code and the Coding Coders who Code it, Maintainable Software, Remote Ruby, Ruby on Rails (2019, 2024), Ruby Blend, Code with Jason (2019, 2021, 2024), Ruby Rogues.

I served on the RubyConf 2024 program committee.

Mentorship

I am a strong believer in the power of peer mentoring. In addition to being a Big Brother, I regularly coach several aspiring engineers in their pursuit of a career in software. I’ve also volunteered as a scholar guide at RailsConf for several years.

Photography

I previously worked as a photojournalist at several newspapers including The Roanoke Times and The Seattle Times. Since then, I’ve contracted for The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal. I now focus on travel and nature in my personal work.

Writing

Projects