Tessa Thornton
Engineering Manager, Coral at Vox Media, LLC.
Old Toronto, Ontario, Canada
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolTessa Thornton is an engineering manager at Vox Media leading the Coral commenting platform, with 13 years of experience building user-facing web applications and shipping front-end improvements at scale. She moved up from hands-on full-stack and front-end roles—contributing to high-profile open source projects like GraphiQL and Shopify’s js-buy-sdk—where she improved UX, cart behavior, and query tooling. Previously CTO at Dot Health and senior front-end developer at Shopify, she combines product-minded leadership with deep front-end craftsmanship and performance-focused fixes. Her background in mentoring and teaching (Juno College) informs a collaborative, coaching-oriented management style. Based in Old Toronto, she pairs a BA in Philosophy and Anthropology with practical engineering chops, a blend that helps her translate complex user needs into elegant interfaces. Notably, she has a track record of improving developer and user workflows by adding small but impactful features like query history, image-variant support, and embedded third-party content.
13 years of coding experience
9 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor of Arts, Philosophy, Anthropology, Bachelor of Arts, Philosophy, Anthropology at University of Toronto - Victoria University
Stackoverflow
45reputation
1kreached
0answers
4questions
Github Skills (30)
javascript10
model-driven10
testing10
css10
typescript10
ui-design10
model-building10
uid10
qunit10
front-end-development10
typescript-types10
typescripts10
modeling10
react10
model-driven-development10
Programming languages (9)
Github contributions (5)
coralproject/talk
Jul 2019 - Jan 2023
A better commenting experience from Vox Media
Role in this project:
Full-stack Developer
Full-stack DeveloperContributions:114 releases, 211 reviews, 369 commits in 3 years 6 months
Contributions summary:Tessa primarily focused on implementing features and fixing bugs within the frontend of the project. Their contributions included fixing UI layout issues, adding functionality to a modal for managing user suspension and incorporating the display of comment reactions within user profiles. The user also worked on improving the overall user experience, including code for enhanced performance, and updating the styling and layout of multiple components. The user also introduced functionality to embed third party content.
reactcomments-widgetjavascriptnodejsgraphql
Shopify/js-buy-sdk
Mar 2016 - Feb 2017
The JS Buy SDK is a lightweight library that allows you to build ecommerce into any website. It is based on Shopify's API and provides the ability to retrieve products and collections from your shop, add products to a cart, and checkout.
Role in this project:Front-end Developer
Front-end DeveloperContributions:6 releases, 44 commits, 42 PRs in 11 months
Contributions summary:Tessa primarily focused on improving the front-end aspects of the Shopify Buy SDK. Their contributions included fixing issues related to local storage, enhancing cart functionality, and adding new features like image variants for cart line items. The user also made changes to the build process and model definitions.
cartapicollectionsretrieveecommerce
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