
Josh Smith
Verified Expert in Engineering
Software Developer
Baltimore, MD, United States
Toptal member since October 11, 2012
Josh is a freelance full stack developer, from graphic design on down to systems administration. He has founded two companies and led product development and engineering work at two others. He loves data-driven design, continuous deployment, and customer development. He fully believes in applying the scientific method to everything he does.
Portfolio
Experience
- SQL - 13 years
- HTML5 - 11 years
- CSS3 - 11 years
- JavaScript - 11 years
- Ruby on Rails (RoR) - 11 years
- Ruby - 11 years
- iOS - 4 years
- Swift - 1 year
Availability
Preferred Environment
Xcode, Asana, GitHub, Git, ITerm, Sublime Text, OS X
The most amazing...
...product I've launched is a real-time social network built in a week with Node.js and Socket.IO. Five days after launch, we had over 1k users.
Work Experience
Founder
Coderly
- Launched a best new App Store iOS app backed by a Rails API to acclaim by TechCrunch, Vogue, and InStyle.
- Launched a social fitness app in the Best Fitness Apps category on iOS, also backed by a Rails API.
- Built my own website for teaching people to cook with a Rails API back-end and Ember.js front-end.
- Built a canvassing app for Bernie 2016.
Founder
Coder.ly
- Built and launched the product in one week.
- Iterated quickly on user feedback to get over 1k users five days later.
- Created a realtime newsfeed using first Socket.IO, and moving to Pusher to make use of private channels for realtime private messages.
- Created a share widget similar to that of Google+ which let users share their status, code samples, and links to interesting items on the internet.
- Built deep LinkedIn integration, which helped the application reach a viral coefficient of 0.8.
Product Lead
Brandskore
- Redesigned the UI from the ground up, from graphic design to code.
- Rewrote all client-side JavaScript and CSS for production, moving from vanilla JS to jQuery and from CSS to LESS.
- Assisted lead back-end developer in re-architecting ASP.NET MVC project to produce mostly JSON, making previously static pages dynamic.
- Improved integration and deployment processes; switching the team from Subversion to Git alone sped up iteration speeds by as much as 50%.
- Managed marketing, metrics, and analytics, making major use of KISSmetrics for product development decisions.
Lead Developer
bLife
- Led the development and execution of technology strategy from architecture to completion.
- Designed web and mobile applications with availability and scalability in mind.
- Implemented features that improved customer experience and usability.
- Managed development team, schedule, and budget.
- Set high QA standards.
Founder
Goals.com
- Acqui-hired in June, 2011 by bLife, a True Ventures portfolio company.
- Architected the entire web application from the bottom up.
- Built a custom content delivery network on top of Amazon’s AWS.
- Built in-house metrics and utilized external A/B testing platforms for UX optimization.
- Designed all custom logos and iconography across the site.
- Launched January, 2011 and grew to 20,000 members.
Experience
Coder.ly
Field the Bern
Reissued
http://techcrunch.com/2014/05/15/reissued-brings-vintage-shopping-to-mobile/Education
Bachelors Degree in Philosophy
University of Maryland, College Park - Maryland
Bachelors Degree in Art History
University of Maryland, College Park - Maryland
Skills
Libraries/APIs
Stripe, Facebook API, X (formerly Twitter) API, jQuery, Node.js, Socket.IO, React, REST APIs, Stripe API, jQuery UI, React Router, Pusher, Amazon FPS
Tools
Sketch, Adobe Fireworks, Webpack, Prisma, Git, Sublime Text, ITerm, GitHub, Asana, Xcode
Languages
CSS, HTML5, Sass, Swift 2, Ruby, Swift, HTML, SQL, CSS3, JavaScript, GraphQL, TypeScript, Less, C#, PHP
Frameworks
Bootstrap, Cocoa Touch, Ruby on Rails (RoR), React Native, Next.js, Tailwind CSS, Jest, Redux, tRPC, NestJS, Express.js, ASP.NET, CodeIgniter, Ember.js
Paradigms
Test-driven Development (TDD), Agile Software Development, Responsive
Platforms
MacOS, iOS, Linux, Unix, WordPress, Ubuntu, Heroku, Amazon Web Services (AWS), OS X
Storage
PostgreSQL, MySQL, Amazon S3 (AWS S3), MongoDB
Other
Lean Development, Web Development, Front-end, Full-stack, Software Development, User Interface (UI), Front-end Development, User Experience (UX), Hybrid Apps, Back-end Development, Mobile UX, Architecture, Apollo, Full-stack Development, Responsiveness, API Integration, Stripe Payments, Software Architecture, CTO, Technical Leadership, TypeORM, Cloudflare, Large Language Models (LLMs), LangChain, OpenAI
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