Tad Thorley is a Senior Software Engineer with 15 years of hands-on experience building full-stack web applications and shipping backend systems for startups and enterprise teams. Based in Lehi, Utah, he has a strong Ruby/Rails pedigree and meaningful open-source contributions to prominent projects like graphql-ruby and CanCanCan, where he improved core field/input handling and authorization rules. Tad has a track record of solving domain-specific problems—from automotive contract generation to oil & gas remote data collection—and brings practical product sensibility from roles at companies like Mozy, Acima, and SixFifty. He pairs engineering depth with front-end polish, having also refined UI theming in public CoffeeScript/CSS projects. Known for mentoring and technology evaluation, he blends legacy system modernization with pragmatic feature delivery and robust test improvements.
15 years of coding experience
19 years of employment as a software developer
MS, Business Information Systems, MS, Business Information Systems at Utah State University
Contributions:29 commits, 8 PRs, 22 comments in 1 year 10 months
Contributions summary:Tad primarily contributed to the authorization logic within the CanCanCan library. Their work involved modifying core files to update how rules are initialized, adding an 'attributes' parameter to rules, and modifying the permitted_attributes method to handle stronger parameter support. They also addressed bugs related to class-level permissions and improved the test suite.
Contributions summary:Tad focused on styling and theming the website's CSS. They made several changes to the `css/default.css` file, including modifications to colors, font families, and margins. The commits show iterative improvements to the visual presentation, with changes to background colors, link styles, and the addition of syntax highlighting. These adjustments indicate a focus on the overall look and feel of the website.
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