Sam Clay
Founder at NewsBlur
Ilchester, Maryland, United States
Summary
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RockstarSam Clay is a founder and veteran full‑stack engineer with 17 years of experience building web products and developer tooling from Ilchester, Maryland. He created NewsBlur and Turn Touch and is currently building Sol Reader, demonstrating a consistent focus on consumer-facing news and productivity apps. An active open-source contributor, Sam has shipped fixes and features to influential JavaScript projects like Underscore and Backbone and improved Rails asset tooling and rich search UIs for DocumentCloud and The New York Times. His work spans front-end UX polish (live zoom previews, rich search boxes) to backend packaging and API integrations, showing a knack for both usability and robust engineering. Notably, he’s contributed subtle but important bug fixes and documentation enhancements that improved template behavior, collection handling, and developer ergonomics across major libraries.
16 years of coding experience
Github Skills (38)
unit-testing10
go-modules10
ruby-rails10
javascript10
utilities10
jquery10
testing10
underscorejs10
css10
packaging10
autocomplete10
underscore10
user-interface10
rails10
kernel-module10
Programming languages (12)
Github contributions (5)
documentcloud/visualsearch
Jun 2011 - Jun 2015
A Rich Search Box for Real Data
Role in this project:
Front-end Developer
Front-end DeveloperContributions:172 commits, 1 PR, 1 push in 4 years
Contributions summary:Sam primarily contributed to the DocumentCloud's VisualSearch.js repository by implementing the UI for search box functionality. The commits show the addition of initial HTML, CSS, and JavaScript code for the core functionality, including a rich search box with auto-completing textboxes and facet categories. The user also added icon images, CSS styling for the various states, and handling of keypress events and text selection.
boxsearch-enginesearch-boxdmsopensearch
documentcloud/document-viewer
Jul 2010 - May 2011
The NYTimes Document Viewer
Role in this project:Front-end Developer
Front-end DeveloperContributions:154 commits in 9 months
Contributions summary:Sam made several front-end focused contributions to the NYTimes Document Viewer, including fixing pixel artifacts on the zoom slider handle and adding live zoom preview. The user implemented changes to improve the annotations display, correctly calculating the scroll offset to ensure annotations don't disappear prematurely and by adjusting offsets on scrolling to align with the annotation edges. The user also improved the user experience by modifying the search bar behavior by adding placeholder and a text selection hide.
nytimesviewerdocument-viewer
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