Todd Hooper is a founder-engineer with 13 years of experience building scalable web infrastructure and running production systems at scale from Boulder, Colorado. He bootstrapped Prerender.io, personally engineering the Node/Headless Chrome-based rendering service, growing it to $2.5M ARR and operating thousands of AWS servers before a successful exit. Todd combines deep backend and DevOps expertise—express middleware, request handling, URL/redirect fixes, HTTPS and gzip support—with practical experience in Java, C/C++, and large enterprise lifecycle systems. His career ranges from aerospace lifecycle software at Lockheed Martin to real-time game server work and custom front-end frameworks, showing an unusual breadth across high-assurance and consumer-scale systems. A hands-on open-source contributor, he owns core Prerender repos that materially improved SEO crawling for JavaScript sites—a niche but widely impactful problem.
13 years of coding experience
12 years of employment as a software developer
B.S., Computer Science, B.S., Computer Science at Georgia Institute of Technology
Express middleware for prerendering javascript-rendered pages on the fly for SEO
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer & DevOps Engineer
Contributions:126 commits, 23 PRs, 51 pushes in 6 years 4 months
Contributions summary:Todd primarily contributed to the backend functionality of the prerender-node project, focusing on adding support for features such as Heroku SSL addon, gzip compression from the prerender service, and handling of various user agents. They also implemented improvements to the build process and fixed redirect problems with the request library. Furthermore, the user demonstrated DevOps skills by modifying the codebase to handle environment variables and ensuring correct API URL generation, including modifications for HTTPS support.
Node server that uses Headless Chrome to render a javascript-rendered page as HTML. To be used in conjunction with prerender middleware.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Contributions:449 commits, 78 PRs, 164 pushes in 7 years
Contributions summary:Todd primarily contributed to the core functionality of the Prerender service, focusing on server-side logic and request handling. The commits demonstrate a focus on modifying and improving the Node.js server code, including updates to the removal of script tags, user agent string manipulation, and exposed environment variables. The user also addressed issues with URL encoding and added features related to handling redirects, indicating a good grasp of web server architecture.
renderprerendercheeriojavascriptnode-server
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