John Allison
CoFounder, Board Member, CTO Emeritus at Customer.io
New York, New York, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolJohn Allison is a seasoned software leader and founder with 17 years of experience building scalable, data-driven customer engagement platforms and web applications. As Co-Founder and former CTO of Customer.io, he helped grow the company from zero to multi‑million ARR while keeping capital raises minimal and now guides strategy at the board level. He blends hands-on backend engineering—evidenced by contributions to go-workers, a Sidekiq‑compatible Golang background worker—with product-minded leadership across growth-stage operations. His career includes leading engineering teams at high‑traffic sites like Gilt and ChallengePost, where performance and scalability were central concerns. Based in New York, he pairs deep practical knowledge of queues, retries, and operational robustness with an ability to translate marketer needs into flexible technical solutions. Notably, he favors pragmatic refactors that improve operability, such as shifting job representations to functions to simplify worker semantics.
18 years of coding experience
16 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor of Science Computer Science Math, Bachelor of Science Computer Science Math at Ouachita Baptist University
Stackoverflow
609reputation
27kreached
16answers
0questions
Github Skills (13)
background-processing10
middleware10
go10
redis10
concurrency10
testing9
cucumber6
activerecord6
internet-explorer6
javascript6
cookie6
ruby6
ruby-on-rails6
Programming languages (7)
Github contributions (5)
jrallison/go-workers
Jul 2013 - Nov 2016
Sidekiq compatible background workers in golang
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:93 commits, 14 PRs, 24 pushes in 3 years 5 months
Contributions summary:John primarily focused on developing the back-end functionality for the go-workers repository. Their commits demonstrate implementing core features like background worker processing, queue management, and middleware integration. They refactored the code to utilize job functions instead of structs. The user also added support for retries, stats, and signal handling, which enhanced the robustness and operability of the background worker system.
golangsidekiq
customerio/fairway
Feb 2013 - Mar 2017
A fair way to queue messages in multi-user systems.
Contributions:129 commits, 1 PR, 14 pushes in 4 years 1 month
multi-user
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