Josh Ford
Senior Product Manager, DevX at NEAR Protocol
Portland, Oregon, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolJosh Ford is a Senior Product Manager for DevX at NEAR Protocol who blends creative craft and technical rigor, having moved from glassblowing and art commerce to building developer tooling for decentralized finance. With six years of concentrated experience in developer relations, engineering, and documentation at NEAR, he has hands-on contributions to core repos like near-api-js and the NEAR docs, improving RPC integrations and developer UX. He advocates for open source and digital sovereignty, focusing on developer experience that enables users to control identities and data. Josh’s background in running IT for call centers and as an independent glass artist gives him a rare mix of systems-level operational discipline and product design sensibility. He’s notable for discovering crypto early—accepting bitcoin for artwork in 2014—and translating that curiosity into shipping protocol-level features and clearer documentation. Based in Portland, he combines community building with pragmatic engineering to lower barriers for builders in the decentralized web.
6 years of coding experience
16 years of employment as a software developer
Attended training courses for A+ Net+ MCSE & CCNA certifications, Attended training courses for A+ Net+ MCSE & CCNA certifications at PC Productivity, Inc.Alchemy Code Lab
Stackoverflow
326reputation
2kreached
8answers
0questions
Github Skills (22)
javascript10
nearprotocol10
typescript10
rpc10
api10
typescript-types10
blockchain10
smart-contracts10
typescripts10
documentation10
markdown9
apidoc9
markdown-it9
co8
github7
Programming languages (9)
Github contributions (5)
near/docs
Jul 2020 - Nov 2022
NEAR Protocol Documentation
Role in this project:
Technical Writer
Technical WriterContributions:228 reviews, 260 commits, 411 PRs in 2 years 4 months
Contributions summary:Josh primarily contributed to the documentation of the NEAR Protocol, making numerous updates and refinements. Their work included fixing broken links, updating API documentation, refactoring content structure, adding sections for new features like governance and dev accounts, and improving the overall user experience. The user demonstrated a strong focus on maintaining the accuracy, clarity, and accessibility of the documentation.
consensusblockchain-platformethereumblockchainnearprotocol
near/near-api-js
Feb 2021 - Aug 2021
JavaScript library to interact with NEAR Protocol via RPC API
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:20 reviews, 43 commits, 25 PRs in 6 months
Contributions summary:Josh contributed significantly to the `near-api-js` library, primarily by adding and modifying methods for interacting with the NEAR Protocol's RPC API. Their work involved implementing new functionalities such as transaction status with receipts, asynchronous transaction sending, and methods to query block changes. They also updated interface definitions and added new types to support the latest RPC features, with a strong focus on providing updated documentation links.
apijavascript-libraryrpcethereumrpc-api
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