Joe Donley is a versatile technologist and hands-on practitioner with 14 years of experience building web and backend systems, contributing to notable open-source projects like the official Elasticsearch .NET client where he improved testability and added feature support. Based in Bellingham, he blends software engineering chops—spanning TypeScript, Haskell, and .NET—with real-world trade skills as a professional battery technician and former carpenter assistant. Joe also runs a small publishing and consulting practice, bringing editorial sensibility and book design expertise to technical projects and client-facing work. His background includes building CMS and ecommerce solutions through acquisitions at Element Fusion, NetSuite, and Oracle, demonstrating an ability to deliver product-focused engineering at scale. Equally comfortable in code, copy, and shop work, he excels at turning complex requirements into practical, testable solutions while mentoring cross-functional teams.
14 years of coding experience
14 years of employment as a software developer
Graphic Design 101 with Matthew Revert Graphic Design, Graphic Design 101 with Matthew Revert Graphic Design at LitReactor
New York Institute of Photography
Contemporary Dark Fiction Creative Writing, Contemporary Dark Fiction Creative Writing at Storyville: Online Writing Classes
Computer Software Engineering, Computer Software Engineering at Francis Tuttle
BA History Music, BA History Music at Southwestern Oklahoma State University
This strongly-typed, client library enables working with Elasticsearch. It is the official client maintained and supported by Elastic.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer & QA Engineer
Contributions:10 commits in 1 month
Contributions summary:Joe primarily focused on improving the .NET client library for Elasticsearch, as well as ensuring testability. They addressed unit test failures by adjusting settings. They also refactored the client to support a newer Newtonsoft.JSON library and fixed an issue with document retrieval, ensuring proper handling of 404 errors. Furthermore, the user added support for highlight results in search queries.
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