Hi!

My name is Joel, and I live in Louisville, Colorado with my wife Caitlin and our Golden Retriever, Captain.

Work

I work on the Design Systems team at GitHub, leading development of the ViewComponent framework and Primer ViewComponents library. I’ve previously worked at Galvanize, Wunder Capital, and MojoTech.

Mentorship

I am a firm believer in the power of peer mentoring. In addition to being a Big Brother, I regularly support several aspiring engineers in their pursuit of a career in software.

Photography

Prior to my career in software, I worked as a photojournalist at several newspapers including The Roanoke Times and The Seattle Times, specializing in sports coverage. I now focus on travel and nature in my personal work.

Writing

• 2021-06-14 The Coaching Habit by Michael Bungay Stanier
• 2021-04-19 The Culture Map by Erin Meyer
• 2021-04-09 My Zoom teleprompter setup
• 2021-03-01 Conference proposal: ViewComponents in the Real World
• 2021-02-02 Nonviolent Communication by Marshall B. Rosenberg
• 2020-11-14 Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television by Jerry Mander
• 2020-01-14 Conference proposal: Encapsulating Views
• 2019-01-10 Conference proposal: Rethinking the View Layer with Components
• 2016-05-31 React and Reflux in 5 minutes
• 2015-10-13 Creating magical UX with Helios
• 2013-01-27 How to rig a post remote camera
• 2013-01-13 Lighting strategies for indoor sports
• 2012-12-07 How to rig a backboard remote camera
• 2012-11-21 Living with the MacBook Air 11"
• 2012-10-29 My photography workflow, from ingest to backup
• 2012-09-25 A study on portfolio design

Projects

• 

  ViewComponent

  2018-present

  I created ViewComponent, a framework for building encapsulated, unit-testable view components in Ruby on Rails.

  I also introduced support for component frameworks like ViewComponent to Rails.

  I’ve spoken about ViewComponent at RailsConf (2019, 2020, 2021), RubyDay IT, RubyConf Taiwan, Boulder Ruby, Ruby Galaxy, ChicagoRuby, and on the Remote Ruby, Ruby on Rails, Ruby Blend, Rails with Jason, and Ruby Rogues podcasts.

• 

  Timeframe

  2013-present

  Wanting to minimize use of my phone around the house, I built Timeframe, an e-paper calendar and weather display.

• 

  SoloFolio

  2008-present

  SoloFolio is a portfolio website platform for visual artists.

  SoloFolio started out as a WordPress theme I built in high school to publish my photography portfolio. In college, a few friends asked to use it for their sites, so I turned it into a SaaS platform.

  I’ve since rewritten it in Ruby on Rails, using it as a test bed for new technologies I want to learn, such as React.