Nathan Long
Staff Software Engineer at GridPoint
Athens-Clarke County Unified Government, Georgia, United States
Summary
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Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolNathan Long is a Staff Software Engineer with 15 years of experience building maintainable, high-performance backend systems, primarily in Elixir and Phoenix. He works remotely and focuses on clear, well-tested code, with deep expertise in database consistency and Postgres constraints informed by significant Ecto contributions. Nathan is an active open-source contributor to core Elixir projects—including Phoenix, Phoenix LiveView, and Elixir itself—where he improves documentation, testing, and subtle runtime behaviors that help teams ship reliably. He regularly teaches through conference talks and technical writing, offering approachable explanations of complex topics like IO lists and GenServer timeouts. Colleagues praise his pragmatic, collaborative approach and knack for pairing on hard problems, and he has a background that spans Ruby/Rails, time libraries like Timex, and production-focused engineering at consultancies and startups. An unexpected strength: he translates deep technical nuance into clear docs and examples that become the go-to reference for others.
15 years of coding experience
16 years of employment as a software developer
University of Georgia
Stackoverflow
124,322reputation
13.1mreached
300answers
370questions
html-table
top-5%
semantics
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jquery-validate
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tcp
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postgresql
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animation
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Github Skills (68)
datetime10
postgresql10
mixing10
mixnet10
testing10
test-framework10
http-post10
security10
ruby10
vim10
mixture10
sudo10
ascii10
ruby-on-rails10
javascript10
Programming languages (24)
Github contributions (5)
nathanl/authority
Mar 2012 - Nov 2019
*CURRENTLY UNMAINTAINED*. Authority helps you authorize actions in your Rails app. It's ORM-neutral and has very little fancy syntax; just group your models under one or more Authorizer classes and write plain Ruby methods on them.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:229 commits, 15 PRs, 33 pushes in 7 years 9 months
Contributions summary:Nathan primarily focused on maintaining and improving the `authority` library, designed for authorization within Rails applications. Their work involved fixing specifications for Ruby versions 1.8.7 and 1.9.3, which indicates a focus on compatibility and ensuring the library functioned correctly across different Ruby environments. They also added extensive comments and refactored the code by renaming controller methods and exception classes to improve clarity and maintainability. This user appears to have also been responsible for refactoring.
authorizeormrails-apprubyauthorization
bitwalker/timex
Aug 2018 - May 2022
A complete date/time library for Elixir projects.
Role in this project:Backend Developer
Backend DeveloperContributions:6 commits, 7 PRs, 3 comments in 3 years 9 months
Contributions summary:Nathan primarily contributed to the `Timex` Elixir library by implementing new functionalities related to time intervals. They added a function to check if one interval contains another and implemented a function to calculate the difference between two intervals. Furthermore, the user made documentation improvements, adding examples and clarifying existing documentation. The contributions showcase a focus on enhancing the core functionalities of the time/date library, especially those dealing with interval operations.
elixirdatetimecalendar
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