Joel Meador
Staff Engineer at Old Chestnut Software
Indianapolis, Indiana, United States
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolJoel Meador is a staff engineer with over 17 years of professional software experience, currently based in Indianapolis and balancing a Staff Engineer role at SmartLogic with his consulting business, Old Chestnut Software. He’s built and shut down systems at every scale—from applications ingesting billions of events per day to niche projects with two visitors—bringing pragmatic judgment about when to iterate and when to retire features. Joel co-created DocRaptor and has deep operational and product experience across monitoring (Instrumental), analytics (Gauges), and web app development, pairing hands-on engineering with customer support, QA automation, and community moderation. His open-source contributions include back-end scripting for DFHack, showing comfort digging into game internals and extending existing tools. Colleagues rely on him for steady, full-stack problem solving and for translating messy real-world requirements into reliable systems.
17 years of coding experience
16 years of employment as a software developer
Johns Hopkins UniversityBS, Computer Science, BS, Computer Science at Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology
Github Skills (8)
lua10
dfm10
fortress10
dwarf10
scripting10
dfa10
dfc10
ruby10
Programming languages (16)
Github contributions (5)
DFHack/scripts
Mar 2019 - Oct 2019
DFHack scripts
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:6 commits, 3 PRs, 11 comments in 6 months
Contributions summary:Joel primarily contributed to script updates for the DFHack project, specifically focusing on the Dwarf Fortress game. Their work included modifying existing scripts, such as `combine-drinks.lua` to refine output, and adding new functionality to `exterminate.rb`, enabling targeting of specific unit types. The user demonstrated a strong understanding of the game's internal structures by modifying and extending existing tools. Their changes involved correcting errors and improving functionality.
dwarf-fortressdfhack
BattletechModders/BT-FYLS
Oct 2018 - Aug 2020
Remove some unnecessary unity stuff from the log
Contributions:6 releases, 16 commits, 2 PRs in 1 year 10 months
unity3dunity
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