Jay Hayes
Senior Software Engineer at Angel Studios
Florence, Alabama, United States
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolJay Hayes is a Senior Software Engineer with 14 years of experience delivering reliable, test-driven backend systems and leading engineering teams. Based in Florence, Alabama, he has moved from hands-on Rails development and teaching at Big Nerd Ranch to product leadership roles at Stitch Fix and currently Angel Studios, combining deep technical craft with mentorship. A committed advocate for testing and robustness, Jay has contributed to major open-source projects including Ruby on Rails and RSpec—fixing database task behaviors and hardening error handling in widely used libraries. He excels at improving legacy codebases and launching new products, notably helping Stitch Fix enter the kids market and rebuilding a congressional database earlier in his career. Colleagues know him for clean design, thorough test coverage, and an unusual habit: he treats rake tasks and formatter specs with as much care as user-facing features.
14 years of coding experience
9 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor of Science - BS, Computer Science, Bachelor of Science - BS, Computer Science at The University of Alabama in Huntsville
Github Skills (16)
ruby10
activerecord10
rspec10
ruby-rails10
error-handling10
filtering10
rails10
json-api10
filter10
ruby-on-rails10
api-design10
actioncable10
test-automation10
testing10
database-management9
Programming languages (13)
Github contributions (5)
rails/rails
Apr 2015 - Dec 2017
Ruby on Rails
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:12 commits, 8 PRs, 71 comments in 2 years 8 months
Contributions summary:Jay contributed to the Ruby on Rails framework by addressing database-related issues and improving the robustness of rake tasks. They fixed test failures, added tests to verify exit statuses for create/drop operations, and ensured the correct behavior of database tasks like create and drop in various scenarios. The user also made adjustments to ActionCable, converting broadcasting and streaming inputs to strings to ensure proper functionality. Their contributions focused on improving error handling and ensuring the correct operation of core Rails features.
ruby-on-railsrailsframeworkrubymvc
cerebris/jsonapi-resources
Nov 2015 - Dec 2015
A resource-focused Rails library for developing JSON:API compliant servers.
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:10 commits, 5 PRs, 40 comments in 27 days
Contributions summary:Jay primarily focused on enhancing the error handling and filtering capabilities of the JSON:API compliant server. Their contributions include adding exception messages and backtraces in non-production environments to aid debugging. They also refactored and introduced new filter strategies, specifically with the `:with` (later renamed to `:apply`) option, and added the ability to verify filters using a `:verify` lambda. Moreover, the user fixed a production environment check and ensured error responses used the correct content type, strengthening the application's robustness.
apijsonapidevelopingrailscompliant
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