M Ford
Principal Software Engineer at Validity Inc.
Ashland, Virginia, United States
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolM Ford is a Principal Software Engineer with 17 years of hands-on experience revitalizing legacy systems and leading teams to modernize production code without needless rewrites. As co-founder of Corgibytes he built a business and team around "software remodeling," applying test-driven practices across many languages and platforms to extend the life and value of existing applications. He’s equally comfortable in high-level architecture and line-by-line bug hunts—his open-source contributions include UX and backend fixes for notable projects like Atom’s tree-view and the Spree e-commerce stack. Known as a practical craftsman, he favors incremental, measurable improvements (and once fixed bugs across everything from Fortran to Kotlin). Based in Ashland, VA, he now brings that blend of leadership and deep maintenance expertise to principal engineering roles at fast-moving companies.
17 years of coding experience
25 years of employment as a software developer
B.S., Computer Science, B.S., Computer Science at Virginia TechHigh School Diploma, general, High School Diploma, general at Patrick Henry High School
English, German, Japanese
Stackoverflow
2,899reputation
900kreached
26answers
2questions
docker
top-5%
sudo
top-5%
Github Skills (35)
ruby-rails10
javascript10
coffeescript10
ecommerce10
dsl10
testing10
rspec10
rails10
ruby10
sql10
commerce10
spree10
ruby-on-rails10
spreed10
erb9
Programming languages (20)
Github contributions (5)
spree/deface
Feb 2012 - Apr 2012
Rails plugin that allows you to customize ERB views in a Rails application without editing the underlying view.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:16 commits in 2 months
Contributions summary:M primarily focused on enhancing the Deface library, a Rails plugin for customizing ERB views. Their commits introduced a DSL (Domain Specific Language) for defining overrides, enabling more flexible view customizations. They modified the DSL loader to support both `.html.erb.deface` and `.html.haml.deface` files, while ensuring correct virtual path resolution within the override files. They also addressed file loading behavior with Rails cache classes.
rails-apirailsrails-applicationrubyrails-plugin
atom/tree-view
Nov 2014 - Jan 2015
🌳 Explore and open project files in Atom
Role in this project:Front-end Developer
Front-end DeveloperContributions:13 commits, 9 comments in 2 months
Contributions summary:M primarily focused on enhancing the user experience of the Atom tree-view package. Their contributions involved implementing alphabetical sorting of directory entries and addressing a type error related to name normalization within the sorting logic. They also added a configuration option to control the sorting behavior (sort folders before files) and refactored the code to improve maintainability. Furthermore, they added tests for the new config option and ensured the focus and scroll position were maintained.
atomexplore
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