Joe Duchnowski Email & Phone Number

Denver, Colorado, United States

Remote

As Director of Engineering, I continued to build upon the foundational work from my role as Founding Engineer. My responsibilities shifted to include conducting interviews across the department, leading a successful hiring round for a senior engineer, and serving as the tech lead for a small UX-focused team. In this role, I maintained a hands-on approach, contributing to software development, and ensuring the delivery of high-quality user experiences. I also played a pivotal role in strategic decision-making, onboarding engineers, and fostering a culture of continuous improvement within the engineering team.

Remote

As the first engineering hire, I built and maintained a number of the platform's early offerings. I worked directly with partners on a number of occasions, made decisions about feasibility, and translated a diverse set of business requirements into abstract processes and services. I worked customer support, internal and external tech support, and solved a huge number of interesting technical challenges. I also recruited, interviewed, and assisted in training new teammates.Some more specific highlights:- Built a fully offline (PWA) surveys app for site surveyors to answer questions and upload photos and videos with Next.js and Laravel. Site surveyors are often in places with weak reception and no wifi, so we used the latest web technologies to replace an old frustrating experience with a PWA that felt native.- Built a customer portal, customizable for each partner using sanity.io as a headless CMS, Laravel as an API, and Next.js as a frontend.- Built a multi-tenant, customer-facing Proposals app using Next.js, Tailwind, Laravel, and Reveal.js. Used by thousands of sales reps and customers in 40+ states every day.- Participated in bootstrapping a typescript monorepo for V2 of the core services that included multiple Next.js applications, a React component library, and a GraphQL API using NestJS, MikroORM, Postgres, and Express.- Other responsibilities included recruiting, interviewing, mentoring, learning, documenting, and sharing.

Akron, Ohio

As an early(ish) engineer at RVshare, I had the opportunity to work with an amazing small team to lay the foundation for a sustainable marketplace that connects RV owners with renters. My role was primarily a full stack product engineer building apps with Ruby on Rails and javascript, but I was also deeply involved in early efforts to improve developer experience (DX).Some highlights:- Built an onboarding wizard for RV owners that collects information about their vehicle and determines their eligibility to list it on the marketplace. I architected the frontend and worked with API engineers to design and create the necessary backend endpoints.- Wrote a serverless log parser using AWS Lambda that allowed the business to get a true understanding of user traffic without noise from spiders and bots.- Automated tedious developer tasks and sped up onboarding by an order of magnitude. When I arrived, local development was very tricky and provisioning a developer's machine took several days. By the time I left, we had it down to 3 commands and new developers were consistently up and running on day 1. This effort, along with our dramatic improvements to CI/CD, saved thousands of hours of dev time.

Cleveland/Akron, Ohio Area

Lead design and development of cutting edge tools for the auto industry that allowed dealers to find and connect with their customers online. This role was my introduction to the startup world and stretched me quite a bit. I learned Python (Django first, then bottle, gevent, etc.), dove into PHP outside of Wordpress for the first time, gained proficiency in AWS, and dove deep into JS build tools like gulp and webpack.Some highlights of my work:- Co-created a white-label solution (home, search, detail pages) for dealers that didn't have an SEO-friendly web presence at the time.- Wrote a tracking pixel that was included on hundreds of partner sites and saw millions of impressions. I didn't realize it at the time, but it was essentially a simplified version of segment.io where our single script wrapped/loaded a handful of other scripts (Google Analytics, Facebook Pixel, etc) and made it easy for dealers to collect data they could use to advertise and retarget.- Wrote a Chrome extension for staff to use that intercepted the pixel request and replaced it with a debug version for verbose logging.

Erie, Pa

Served an internship in the summer of 2010 with the User Experience Department and was brought on full time shortly after that. Developed solutions for Agents, Customers, and Employees that worked with all modern browsers as far back as IE7. Created fast, usable systems with SharePoint 2010 as a foundation. Other duties included script writing, troubleshooting, support, and User Interface design.

Erie, Pa

Manufactured and sold LED "mods" for the original XBOX. Sourced materials from Alibaba, marketed and sold hundreds of products and services via online forums and word of mouth.