Joe Schafer
Software Engineer at Canals
San Francisco, California, United States
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolJoe Schafer is a software engineer with 17 years of experience building reliable, high-performance systems and leading teams from startup to scale in the San Francisco Bay Area. A former paratrooper and infantry officer turned technologist, he combines operational rigor with hands-on engineering across backend, data infrastructure, and full-stack projects. He co-founded and served as CTO of SimpleCircle (acquired by Arryved) and drove major reliability and automation work at Heap, including a Go control plane that slashed recovery and maintenance windows for a 1.4 PB sharded Postgres fleet. At Google he led a small team building a Spanner/Bigtable-backed platform that supported $2B in revenue, and his open-source contributions span tooling and Emacs ecosystems, focusing on code quality and maintainability. Practical, systems-first, and curious, he brings an uncommon mix of battlefield leadership, product-level ownership, and deep infrastructure expertise.
17 years of coding experience
9 years of employment as a software developer
B.S. Computer Science, B.S. Computer Science at United States Military Academy at West PointCertificate in Innovation and Entrepreneurship Business, Certificate in Innovation and Entrepreneurship Business at Stanford University Graduate School of Business
Stackoverflow
3,480reputation
247kreached
27answers
61questions
Github Skills (34)
algorithm10
algorithms10
javascript10
rosetta-code10
package-management10
configuration-management10
software-quality10
data-structure10
refactor10
emacs-lisp10
code-analysis10
data-structures10
refactoring10
rust10
code-readability10
Programming languages (22)
Github contributions (5)
antipalindrome/Photoshop-Export-Layers-to-Files-Fast
Nov 2014 - Nov 2014
This script allows you to export your layers as individual files at a speed much faster than the built-in script from Adobe.
Role in this project:
Full-stack Developer
Full-stack DeveloperContributions:45 commits, 1 comment in 1 day
Contributions summary:Joe primarily focused on improving the "Export Layers To Files" script for Adobe Photoshop. Their work involved fixing indentation issues, adding missing semicolons, and explicitly declaring global variables to improve code readability and maintainability. Additionally, they prefixed `executeActionGet`, `executeAction`, `stringIDToTypeID`, `charIDToTypeID`, and `app.version` with `app` for clarity, and addressed a bug in `LetterCase` by adding breaks to case statements, enhancing overall code quality and user experience. They also replaced a `with` statement with variables.
individualadobeexportspeedextendscript
rust-rosetta/rust-rosetta
Feb 2014 - Apr 2015
Implementing Rosetta Code problems in Rust.
Role in this project:Full-stack Developer
Full-stack DeveloperContributions:53 commits, 1 push, 2 comments in 1 year 1 month
Contributions summary:Joe contributed various implementations to solve problems from Rosetta Code in Rust. They implemented algorithms like the Sieve of Eratosthenes, mutual recursion, and various loop examples. Additionally, the user fixed compilation errors and added features like tests and examples.
rosetta-coderust
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