Alan Johnson
Senior Software Engineer at Cardinal
Greenville, South Carolina, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolAlan Johnson is a Senior Software Engineer with 16 years of experience blending hands-on engineering and startup leadership from co-founding multiple ventures to returning to senior individual contributor roles. Based in Greenville, SC, he has shipped core features in widely used open-source projects like Handlebars.js—improving nested context lookups and templating stability—and contributed backend and DevOps work to Optic’s OpenAPI tooling. His career oscillates between building teams and building code, reflecting his self-description as a "programmer turned manager turned programmer" and a comfort with both product strategy and deep technical implementation. Alan has repeatedly taken on roles that require designing APIs, CI/CD, and async run workflows, showing strong systems thinking across full-stack and backend domains. He holds a BS in Computer Science from Clemson and brings entrepreneurial grit from founding companies like Treehouse and Cardinal. Colleagues can count on him for pragmatic, durable solutions that bridge developer experience and production reliability.
16 years of coding experience
14 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor of Science - BS, Computer Sc, Bachelor of Science - BS, Computer Sc at Clemson University
Github Skills (25)
javascript10
mustache10
handlebars10
apidoc10
typescript10
html-template10
python-templates10
code-templates10
apptemplates10
api10
typescript-types10
typescripts10
cpp-templates10
openapi10
test-driven-design9
Programming languages (12)
Github contributions (5)
handlebars-lang/handlebars.js
Aug 2010 - Sep 2011
Minimal templating on steroids.
Role in this project:
Full-stack Developer
Full-stack DeveloperContributions:125 commits in 1 year 1 month
Contributions summary:Alan primarily contributed to the development of the Handlebars.js templating library. Their work focused on enhancing the library's core functionality, specifically by implementing support for nested context lookups, and parent/child syntax, improving the handling of expression evaluations, and adding features like partials. The user also addressed several bugs and edge cases within the templating engine, enhancing overall stability. The user's work directly involved changes to the core library code and testing framework.
template-enginetemplatetemplatingmustachesteroids
opticdev/optic
Jun 2022 - Jan 2023
OpenAPI linting, diffing and testing. Optic helps prevent breaking changes, publish accurate documentation and improve the design of your APIs.
Role in this project:Back-end Developer & DevOps Engineer
Back-end Developer & DevOps EngineerContributions:1 release, 146 reviews, 103 commits in 7 months
Contributions summary:Alan primarily worked on building out a new initialization function (`initRun`) for a cloud comparison feature, likely involving comparing OpenAPI specifications. This involved creating the `SpecInput` type, adding upload slots, and stubbing out the `initRun` function with calls to the Optic backend client for session management and file uploads. Further contributions included the creation of a function for waiting for a run's completion, which likely handles the asynchronous nature of the API comparisons. Their work also involved modifying the Optic backend client and related CI/CD components.
changesapiredocopticfollow
Find and Hire Top DevelopersWe’ve analyzed the programming source code of over 60 million software developers on GitHub and scored them by 50,000 skills. Sign-up on Prog,AI to search for software developers.