John Gadbois is a seasoned engineering leader with 15+ years building and scaling web platforms, currently serving as Director of Engineering after a long tenure as CTO at Exercise.com. He combines hands-on backend expertise in Ruby on Rails, PostgreSQL, Redis and API design with leadership of DevOps and mobile engineering teams. His work spans consumer-facing features (social networking and iOS APIs) to high-throughput site scaling and integrations, and he has contributed backend fixes and feature work to notable open-source projects like The Events Calendar and the Forem forum engine. A former software engineer for Navy-deployed Java web apps and an MBA-holder with an MS in Computer Science, he bridges disciplined engineering practices with product-focused decision making. Based in Connecticut, he brings startup grit and enterprise experience, often surfacing non-obvious efficiency wins in database and import logic that reduce operational friction.
15 years of coding experience
22 years of employment as a software developer
Computer Science summa cum laude, Computer Science summa cum laude at Bob Jones University
Master of Science (M.S.) Computer Science, Master of Science (M.S.) Computer Science at Georgia Institute of Technology
MBA International Business, MBA International Business at University of Connecticut School of Business
Contributions summary:John's commits primarily focus on backend development within the Events Calendar Pro WordPress plugin, specifically for the Events Calendar Pro add-on. The user worked on addressing bugs related to saving event data, including venue and organizer details, and taxonomy links. Moreover, the user implemented new query interfaces and enhanced the Google Calendar import functionality. There is a strong focus on database interactions and WordPress plugin development.
Contributions summary:John primarily focused on enhancing the forum engine's functionality. They added features for quoting posts, including modifying the post form and controller to handle quoted text. They introduced a blockquote feature that depended on the presence of a formatter, and updated helpers and views to accommodate this change. Additionally, the user added features to allow users to subscribe to topics from posts and delivered emails after a new post was saved.
railseverforumforum-engineruby
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