Paul Straw
Engineering Director, Zero at Metalab
Portland, Oregon, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolPaul Straw is an engineering director and product-minded technologist with 15 years of experience shipping web and mobile applications, currently leading Zero at MetaLab from Portland, Oregon. He blends hands-on front-end craftsmanship—evidenced by open-source work like FancySelect and the Drift image-zoom library—with senior leadership across startups and agencies, including Principal Engineer roles at SideDoor, Cometeer, and MetaLab. Paul started his career in IT and steadily moved into software leadership, giving him an unusual depth across infrastructure, developer experience, and user-facing design. He enjoys building playful electronics and video games in his spare time, which informs a pragmatic focus on delightful user interactions. Known for poking "weird sand" until interesting things emerge, he brings curiosity and experimentation to product engineering at scale.
15 years of coding experience
17 years of employment as a software developer
Columbia College
Stackoverflow
726reputation
18kreached
5answers
0questions
image
top-5%
Github Skills (12)
html10
css10
javascript10
front-end-development10
jquery9
image9
ui-design9
responsive-design9
imgix6
client-hints6
cloudinary6
sorting6
Programming languages (20)
Github contributions (5)
paulstraw/FancySelect
Aug 2013 - Aug 2016
A better select for discerning web developers everywhere.
Role in this project:
Front-end Developer
Front-end DeveloperContributions:28 commits, 1 PR, 2 pushes in 3 years
Contributions summary:Paul primarily focused on enhancing the functionality and appearance of a custom select component. They updated the component's styling, including transitions and responsiveness, and fixed several bugs. Their work also involved refactoring code and adding features like enabling/disabling and compatibility with jQuery's noConflict mode. They also added features to the demo page.
javascriptreact
strawdynamics/drift
Dec 2015 - Dec 2016
Easily add "zoom on hover" functionality to your site's images. Lightweight, no-dependency JavaScript.
Role in this project:Front-end Developer
Front-end DeveloperContributions:19 releases, 99 commits, 38 PRs in 11 months
Contributions summary:Paul's contributions focused on the foundational structure and basic functionality of the drift JavaScript library, specifically adding the core functionality of a "zoom on hover" effect for site images. The commits involved creating a basic implementation of the Drift class and its associated methods, as well as defining key properties such as source attribute, a loader, and basic CSS for styling. The user also added touch and mouse-based support for image manipulation.
imagejavascripthover-effectszoom-imageshover
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