Montana Low
Member Of Technical Staff at Private Company
San Francisco, California, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolMontana Low is a seasoned software engineer and entrepreneur with 14 years of experience building and leading product-focused engineering teams from startup to scale. Based in San Francisco, he combines deep backend expertise—demonstrated by contributions to prominent open-source projects like Ruby on Rails, Textacular, and Ransack—with hands-on machine learning and infrastructure work from roles at Instacart and as founder of PostgresML. He has founded multiple companies and led technical organizations, applying first-principles thinking to ship robust, well-tested systems and to manage releases and compatibility across ecosystems. Raised on a farm in Oklahoma, he brings practical resourcefulness and a systems mindset—he literally wired a lumberyard to host his first server—and values mentorship learned from collaborators. His work spans full-stack security and collaboration tooling (Dradis) to database-focused ML products, showing an unusual blend of product leadership and low-level engineering. Montana is now building a company culture that prizes interesting lives and technical craftsmanship as much as shipping high-quality software.
14 years of coding experience
22 years of employment as a software developer
Startups, Startups at Y CombinatorBachelor of Science Computer Science, Bachelor of Science Computer Science at Portland State UniversityDropout Electrical Engineering, Dropout Electrical Engineering at Texas A&M UniversityDropout Computer Engineering, Dropout Computer Engineering at University of Oklahoma
Stackoverflow
81reputation
18kreached
0answers
2questions
Github Skills (37)
yii10
ruby-rails10
postgresql10
back-end-development10
testing10
rails10
ruby10
php-framework10
php10
html10
version-control10
activerecord10
web-framework10
backend10
ruby-on-rails10
Programming languages (10)
Github contributions (5)
textacular/textacular
Mar 2013 - Jan 2023
Textacular exposes full text search capabilities from PostgreSQL, and allows you to declare full text indexes. Textacular will extend ActiveRecord with named_scope methods making searching easy and fun!
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:4 releases, 94 commits, 65 PRs in 9 years 11 months
Contributions summary:Montana primarily contributed to bug fixes and feature enhancements within the Textacular library. They focused on addressing issues related to advanced search negation, type casting, and Rails 5 compatibility. Furthermore, the user was responsible for release management, including version bumping and preparing for major version releases, indicating a role in managing the library's lifecycle. Several commits also involved fixing and updating specs.
declarefull-text-searchindexesrailsfull-text
activerecord-hackery/ransack
Jun 2018 - Dec 2021
Object-based searching.
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:3 releases, 75 commits, 75 PRs in 3 years 6 months
Contributions summary:Montana contributed to the `ransack` gem, which provides object-based searching for Rails applications. Their commits primarily involved refactoring and adapting the code to support different versions of ActiveRecord and Rails, specifically focusing on join dependencies and polymorphic associations. The user's work ensured compatibility across various Rails versions and improved the gem's functionality. They also bumped the gem's version.
ruby-on-railsruby-gemrailssqlsearch-interface
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