Jay Pfaffman
Owner at Literate Computing, LLC
Nashville-Davidson, Tennessee, United States
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolJay Pfaffman is the owner of Literate Computing and a specialist in deploying, migrating, and maintaining Discourse communities, with 11 years of hands-on experience automating installs, building plugins/themes, and contributing importer improvements to the core Discourse project. He blends deep practical DevOps skills—making Discourse accessible to novices and relieving busy sysadmins—with an educator’s mindset from a prior career as a university professor and educational researcher. That background led him to pioneer using Discourse for online teaching and to develop custom importers and ETL tools that rescue legacy forum data for analysis or classroom use. Based in Nashville, he pairs careful error-checking and robust scripting (including enhanced import/permalink support in discourse/discourse) with thoughtful UX for academic communities. Unusually, he can move fluently between running production infrastructure and designing pedagogically sound discussion spaces, making him a go-to consultant for schools and researchers migrating or sustaining online forums.
10 years of coding experience
17 years of employment as a software developer
Ph.D., Education and Human Development, Ph.D., Education and Human Development at Vanderbilt University
Stackoverflow
1reputation
0reached
1answer
0questions
Github Skills (15)
ruby10
sql10
mysql10
discourse10
php9
database-management9
rails8
ruby-rails8
postgresql8
ruby-on-rails7
emacs6
ssh6
javascript5
html5
ember3
Programming languages (11)
Github contributions (5)
discourse/discourse
Sep 2016 - Jul 2022
A platform for community discussion. Free, open, simple.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:48 commits, 63 PRs, 43 comments in 5 years 11 months
Contributions summary:Jay primarily worked on improving and extending import scripts for various forum platforms, including Kunena, Mbox, BBPress, MyBB, and others. Their contributions involved configuring import scripts using environment variables, enhancing error checking and reporting, and adding permalink support. They refactored and improved existing codebase for better performance and handling of various data formats.
discourserailsforumjavascriptruby
pfaffman/aect2015
Jun 2015 - May 2022
Contributions:9 pushes, 1 branch in 7 years
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