Joel Van Horn
Head Of Engineering at Rodeo
New York, New York, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolJoel Van Horn is a seasoned engineering leader with 15 years of experience building scalable, data-driven platforms and AI systems from startup to enterprise scale. Currently Head of Engineering at Revic AI, he architects agentic LLM platforms and Databricks-backed data lakes while mentoring distributed teams to deliver production-grade ML and automation. His background as CTO and founder spans subscription commerce and DTC scale-ups where he built custom subscription engines and event-sourced architectures that powered rapid growth and acquisitions. A hands-on polyglot, Joel contributes to the Ruby ecosystem—improving event sourcing and dotenv parsing—and pairs deep backend refactoring skills with pragmatic product thinking. He’s known for squeezing strong model performance out of constrained infrastructure (raising NLP query accuracy from single digits to 75%+) and for turning complex integration challenges into cost-saving, automatable solutions.
15 years of coding experience
24 years of employment as a software developer
Southern Connecticut State University
English, German
Stackoverflow
16,878reputation
4.9mreached
15answers
1question
authentication
top-5%
javascript
top-1%
Github Skills (32)
eventstore10
javascript10
grapesjs10
testing10
swagger10
dotenv10
regex10
event-sourcing10
ruby10
api10
database-design10
gr10
documentation10
cqrs9
admin9
Programming languages (16)
Github contributions (5)
RailsEventStore/rails_event_store
Mar 2018 - Oct 2019
A Ruby implementation of an Event Store based on Active Record
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:182 commits, 33 PRs, 72 pushes in 1 year 7 months
Contributions summary:Joel primarily focused on refactoring the Ruby Event Store's persistence layer, specifically the integration with a ROM-based database. They removed dependencies on ActiveSupport, moved and renamed read methods, and refactored the `add_to_stream` functionality to improve efficiency. Furthermore, the user implemented JSON/YAML serialization in the adapter's schema.
dddevent-sourcingrailsaggregate-rootcqrs-es
bkeepers/dotenv
Jan 2018 - May 2018
A Ruby gem to load environment variables from `.env`.
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:16 commits, 3 PRs, 14 comments in 3 months
Contributions summary:Joel primarily contributed to improving the `dotenv` Ruby gem, focusing on parsing and handling environment variables from `.env` files. Their work involved modifying the parsing logic to correctly handle multi-line values, escape special characters, and include variables without values. Additionally, the user added tests to validate these parsing improvements and fixed Rubocop offenses. The user also addressed a regression related to how the gem parses comments and includes variables without values.
environment-variablesconfigurationruby-gemdotenvruby
Find and Hire Top DevelopersWe’ve analyzed the programming source code of over 60 million software developers on GitHub and scored them by 50,000 skills. Sign-up on Prog,AI to search for software developers.