Joel Turkel
Chief Architect at Salsify
Massachusetts, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolJoel Turkel is a seasoned chief architect and founding engineer with 13+ years building scalable backend systems, currently leading architecture at Salsify from Massachusetts. He brings deep expertise in Ruby/Rails and GraphQL—demonstrated by substantive contributions to widely used open-source projects like graphql-ruby and Goldiloader that improved schema flexibility and eager-loading across Rails versions. His career spans senior engineering and architect roles at Endeca and Oracle, blending hands-on development with team leadership and product-minded system design. Joel’s background in applied math and computer science from Brown underpins a pragmatic approach to solving tricky edge cases and performance challenges in data-rich applications.
13 years of coding experience
14 years of employment as a software developer
B.S. Applied Mathematics/Computer Science, B.S. Applied Mathematics/Computer Science at Brown University
Github Skills (14)
testing10
activerecord10
graphql10
graphql-ruby10
gemspec10
rails10
schema-design10
gemfile10
wordpress-graphql10
wpgraphql10
ruby-on-rails10
rubygems10
ruby10
rspec9
Programming languages (9)
Github contributions (5)
salsify/goldiloader
Jun 2014 - Jan 2023
Just the right amount of Rails eager loading
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:33 reviews, 158 commits, 146 PRs in 8 years 8 months
Contributions summary:Joel primarily contributed to improving the eager loading capabilities within the Goldiloader gem, focusing on supporting different versions of Rails (4.x, 5.x, 6.x). Their work involved refactoring code, removing debugging output, and implementing changes to ensure proper eager loading behavior, particularly for associations like has_many, belongs_to, and polymorphic associations. The user's commits also addressed specific edge cases and bugs within the eager loading mechanism. They added tests to verify the eager loading of various association types.
ruby-on-railseagerrailsrubyperformance
rmosolgo/graphql-ruby
Mar 2018 - Mar 2021
Ruby implementation of GraphQL
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:7 reviews, 45 commits, 41 PRs in 3 years 1 month
Contributions summary:Joel primarily contributed to enhancing the `graphql-ruby` library. Their work focused on implementing and refining features related to schema definition and execution, particularly for unions, interfaces, and scalar types. The user also implemented functionalities for custom JSON scalar types and deprecated arguments, demonstrating expertise in extending the library's capabilities. These contributions directly improved the usability and flexibility of the GraphQL implementation.
relayrailsrubygraphqlgraphql-ruby
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