Josh Clayton

[email protected]

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Summary

Josh is an empathetic technical leader and software consultant with almost twenty years of professional software development experience and nine years of experience managing business financials, leading teammate hiring and retention, closing software consulting sales, and ensuring customer success while upholding high standards of work.

Current

Managing Director, Boost / thoughtbot

– Present

Business

  • Grew 2021 projected revenue by 15% to $7.5MM and profit from $725k to $1.6MM
  • Led the sales process from customer discovery to contract signature while ensuring work closed aligned with teammate interests
  • Selected successful engagements include projects with Mozilla, New England Journal of Medicine, Epic Games, Code for America, and Cisco Meraki

Consulting Engagements

  • Transitioned a set of disparate services (Typeform, Shopify, Google Sheets, Zoom) managing virtual events to a well-tested internal platform built in Ruby on Rails managing hundreds of seminars and thousands of events
  • Migrated a complicated deployment architecture of static content and an Elixir & Phoenix application to Heroku and Netlify with Cloudflare, serving 5.5B requests and 225TB of content monthly
  • Ingested multiple years of financial data from a client's data warehouse into an internal Rails product to equip the executive team to make data-driven decisions about future product releases and promotions
  • Partnered with two teammates to develop custom content for a two-day RSpec workshop administered to over 75 engineers of varying skill levels

Hiring

  • Redesigned hiring processes to assess for high-level strategy and tactics for two open Director roles within Boost
  • Developed a working Rails application, jobs-to-be-done stories, and rubric for Boost's final-stage Rails interview to reduce bias and increase confidence in hiring decisions

Team Upskilling and Enablement

  • Coordinated team bi-weekly meetings with topics ranging from web accessibility and GraphQL to consulting considerations and how thoughtbot operates as a business
  • Worked with technical leaders on the team to optimize client staffing to balance skillsets required against growth opportunities for the team
  • Developed two Rust-based CLI tools to support technical evaluation of potential client codebases
  • Introduced a six-email drip campaign for all new teammates joining Boost to provide context around team history, areas of focus, and expectations

Technologies

  • Ruby/Rails
  • RSpec
  • GraphQL
  • Rust
  • Elm
  • PostgreSQL
  • Elixir/Phoenix
  • Heroku
  • Netlify

Work Experience

Managing Director, Boston / thoughtbot

–

  • Partnered with technical leadership to redesign thoughtbot's Rails technical interview to reduce bias and increase confidence in hiring decisions
  • Introduced lunch-and-learn events to build client relationships and level up engineers' skill sets
  • Developed and led software consulting workshops to increase software consulting capacity within and beyond the Boston team
  • Consulted across a broad set of services, including full-stack software development, technical leadership, technical process and SDLC, product management, project management, and project advisorship for more than sixty clients
  • Mentored at both MassChallenge and TechStars Boston to engage with company founders of Boston's start-up scene
  • Managed the FactoryBot and FactoryBotRails Rubygems from the 2.0 release through the 4.8 release, including feature development, issue triage, and community engagement

Consulting Engagements

  • Researched, developed a strategy for, and began initial implementation to replace a home-grown authentication system with Devise in a monolith Rails application
  • Developed a suite of Elm packages to power Mariott Bonvoy Moments' interactive booking flow
  • Provided technical project management and front-end development support (TypeScript and Angular) on an internal-facing tool for Google
  • Crafted a take-home technical interview for an online retailer to administer to applicants, including rubric, assessment criteria, and support for varying seniority levels

Technologies

  • Ruby/Rails
  • RSpec
  • GraphQL
  • Haskell
  • Elm
  • PostgreSQL
  • Elixir/Phoenix
  • Heroku
  • EmberJS
  • BackboneJS
  • TypeScript
  • CoffeeScript
  • AngularJS
  • Redis

Developer / thoughtbot

–

  • Consulted with clients across a number of different industries, including e-commerce, edtech, and martech platforms
  • Developed and led a two-day in-person workshop, Test-Driven Rails, over multiple years, before moving the content online
  • Completed multiple rotations as product manager for thoughtbot's Airbrake product
  • Co-authored a 60-page e-book, Geocoding on Rails, with Laila Winner
  • Authored one of thoughtbot's most-viewed blog posts, A Tmux Crash Course

Consulting Engagements

  • Designed and implemented a microservice for efficient curated ad-based targeting, driving 75th percentile response times from 10s to <200ms
  • Developed a custom analytics platform tracking purchases and promotions for a novel QR-code-based payment system primarily used by food vendors in Boston

Technologies

  • Ruby/Rails
  • RSpec
  • PostgreSQL
  • Heroku
  • BackboneJS
  • CoffeeScript
  • Redis
  • MongoDB
  • RabbitMQ

Software Consultant / Fusionary Media

–

Consulting Engagements

  • Developed a documentation system for General Motors built in Ruby on Rails
  • Developed a greenfield Ruby on Rails application managing a product inventory and PDF product catalog with PrinceXML

Technologies

  • Ruby/Rails
  • Test::Unit
  • RSpec
  • MySQL
  • Capistrano
  • jQuery

Web Applications Developer / Rapidparts

–

  • Developed multiple internal and customer-facing web applications using ASP, ASP.net, and C#

Technologies

  • ASP
  • ASP.net
  • C#
  • SQL Server/T-SQL
  • XSLT

Rifleman (0311) / United States Marine Corps

–

Open Source