James Socol
Staff Software Engineer at Fastly
New York, New York, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolJames Socol is a Staff Software Engineer and engineering leader with 14 years of experience building distributed systems, full-stack web applications, and high-performing teams in companies from Mozilla to Fastly. He practices servant-style management—creating clarity, career ladders, and metrics-driven ownership—while removing barriers so teams can move fast and sustainably. Technically fluent in JavaScript/React, Python/Django/Flask, and Go, he has repeatedly designed continuous delivery pipelines and platform improvements that scaled developer productivity. A committed open-source maintainer, he has contributed to widely used projects like Mozilla's bleach and several Django libraries, and historically ran TodaysMeet, a classroom chat platform that reached millions and served as a long-running solo product and learning lab. Colocated in New York, he blends hands-on engineering, cross-functional collaboration with design/product/analytics, and organization-level initiatives like hiring and on-call reform to align strategy with execution.
13 years of coding experience
16 years of employment as a software developer
BS Mathematics, BS Mathematics at Michigan State University
Stackoverflow
1,795reputation
343kreached
51answers
0questions
php
top-5%
Github Skills (29)
caching10
rate-limiting10
content-security-policy10
statsd10
python10
apidoc10
sec10
django10
testing10
feature-flags10
api10
html-sanitization10
html10
documentation10
middleware9
Programming languages (11)
Github contributions (5)
jsocol/pystatsd
Mar 2013 - Dec 2022
A Python client for statsd
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:2 releases, 3 reviews, 143 commits in 9 years 10 months
Contributions summary:James primarily worked on the `pystatsd` library, a Python client for statsd. Their commits focused on refactoring the code by removing and replacing functionality like `flush()` and `batch_len`, which indicates they are actively changing core aspects. They added a pipeline and timer, as well as updating docs. Later, they incorporated set and delta functionalities.
statsdpythonpython-client
jsocol/django-ratelimit
Jan 2013 - Dec 2022
Cache-based rate-limiting for Django
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:2 releases, 16 reviews, 190 commits in 10 years
Contributions summary:James primarily focused on enhancing the functionality and maintainability of the Django-based rate-limiting library. Their contributions involved implementing features to support custom exception handling with Django middleware, including creating a custom error view for handling rate limits and testing. The user also made changes to improve usability and functionality by adding support for different configurations and allowing the customization of cache keys. The user also made improvements to documentation and test coverage.
djangolimitingcacherate-limiting
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