Clay Diffrient
Staff Software Engineer at Derivita
Sandy, Utah, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolClay Diffrient is a Staff Software Engineer with 13 years of experience building accessible, scalable front-end systems—primarily in JavaScript—for education-focused products. He has led frontend architecture, component libraries, accessibility, and testing strategies at Derivita and contributed significant UI and accessibility improvements to the widely used open-source Canvas LMS and React Modal projects. A committed mentor and educator, he runs internal trainings, conducts technical interviews, and pairs with engineers to raise team capability. With a Master’s in Instructional Design and Educational Technology and a long history in LMS tooling, he blends pedagogy with pragmatic engineering to create interfaces that help people learn and grow. Notably, his open-source work includes refactoring build systems and improving keyboard/focus behavior, reflecting a detail-oriented approach to usability and maintainability.
13 years of coding experience
13 years of employment as a software developer
High School, High School at West Lincoln High SchoolThe University of UtahBrigham Young University-Idaho
English, French, Spanish
Stackoverflow
1,306reputation
140kreached
18answers
23questions
Github Skills (20)
javascript10
css10
modals10
ui-design10
webpack10
uid10
modal-dialog10
front-end-development10
webpacker10
modal-windows10
react10
accessibility9
html8
nodejs6
backbonejs6
Programming languages (13)
Github contributions (5)
reactjs/react-modal
Sep 2014 - Apr 2017
Accessible modal dialog component for React
Role in this project:
Front-end Developer
Front-end DeveloperContributions:88 commits, 99 PRs, 161 pushes in 2 years 7 months
Contributions summary:Clay's contributions primarily focus on enhancing the React Modal component. They implemented features such as the ability to specify custom styles for modal content and overriding default styles with custom class names. The user also addressed keyboard handling issues and refactored the build process by migrating from Browserify to Webpack. These changes improved the component's flexibility and maintainability.
reactdialogmodalaccessiblejavascript
instructure/canvas-lms
Aug 2014 - Jan 2020
The open LMS by Instructure, Inc.
Role in this project:Front-end Developer
Front-end DeveloperContributions:860 commits, 22 PRs, 193 comments in 5 years 6 months
Contributions summary:Clay contributed to the front-end development of the Canvas LMS, focusing on UI improvements and feature implementation. The contributions included enhancements to the wiki page input box focus behavior, bug fixes for the theme editor, refactoring the code to remove feature flags, fixing display of content, and improved handling of styling. They were also responsible for improving accessibility with features like focus indicators.
open-lmsinstructurecanvas-lmslmsinc
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