Hi!
My name is Joel, and I live in Louisville, Colorado with my wife Caitlin and our Golden Retriever, Captain.
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.
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.
My formal education is in photojournalism.
Prior to my career in software, I worked as a photographer at several newspapers including The Roanoke Times and The Seattle Times, specializing in sports coverage.
Today, my freelance clients include The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal. I focus on travel and nature in my personal work.
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 the project at RailsConf (2019, 2020), RubyConf Taiwan, Boulder Ruby, and on the Remote Ruby, Ruby on Rails, Ruby Blend, Rails with Jason, and Ruby Rogues podcasts.
Wanting to minimize use of my phone around the house, I built Timeframe, an e-paper calendar and weather display.
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.