Michael Goddard
Lead Developer at J-Novel Club
Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolMichael Goddard is a Lead Developer with 14 years of experience building high-performance web apps, games, and interactive media from Cambridge, MA. He combines deep front-end expertise in WebGL and real-time rendering (notably contributions to Scratch's render and VM) with back-end performance engineering, having improved caching and build-time performance on tools like hard-source-webpack-plugin. Michael led TypeScript migrations and browser-compatibility work on Airtable's JS client, demonstrating a pragmatic focus on maintainability and developer ergonomics. His progression from co-founder of a small studio to senior and principal engineering roles at Bocoup and now leading development at J-Novel Club shows both technical breadth and leadership. He’s as comfortable optimizing shaders and memory allocation as he is modernizing build systems and developer tooling—an engineer who quietly improves performance and developer experience across the stack.
14 years of coding experience
14 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor Computer Science Games and Simulations, Bachelor Computer Science Games and Simulations at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
Stackoverflow
21reputation
1kreached
2answers
0questions
Github Skills (32)
webgl10
algorithms10
caching10
javascript10
shader10
typescript10
glsl10
sourcemaps10
webpack10
front-end-development10
computer-engineering10
performance-optimization10
webpacker10
build-automation10
typescript-types10
Programming languages (9)
Github contributions (5)
mzgoddard/hard-source-webpack-plugin
Aug 2016 - Dec 2018
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:1115 commits, 340 PRs, 684 pushes in 2 years 4 months
Contributions summary:Michael contributed to the development of the hard-source-webpack-plugin, focusing on improving its caching capabilities. Their work involved implementing new features, such as support for ES2015 modules and advanced source map generation, as well as addressing critical bugs. They also refactored the caching mechanism, transitioning to leveldb for increased efficiency, and improved the plugin's build time performance with features such as caching improvements.
webpack-pluginwebpackwebpack-cache
scratchfoundation/scratch-render
Nov 2017 - Sep 2019
WebGL-based rendering engine for Scratch 3.0
Role in this project:Front-end Developer
Front-end DeveloperContributions:42 commits, 20 PRs, 4 pushes in 1 year 10 months
Contributions summary:Michael primarily contributed to the `scratch-render` repository, a WebGL-based rendering engine for Scratch 3.0. Their work involved optimizing rendering performance and functionality. This includes changes to shaders to eliminate conditional statements, as well as implementing silhouette rendering and touch detection capabilities. They also refactored code, such as comparing floating-point values.
rendering-enginewebglthreejsrenderingscratch
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.