Will Jessop
Principal Engineer Performance, Architecture And Scaling at Impactive by ActBlue
Stevenage, England, United Kingdom
Summary
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SeniorWill Jessop is a principal engineer and technical leader with 14 years of experience specializing in Ruby on Rails performance, application scaling, and Postgres optimization. He led architecture and scaling efforts as CTO of Impactive, directly enabling the platform to handle election-critical traffic peaks (over 3000 req/s) and instituting engineering practices—eight-week cycles, stricter code review, and end-to-end testing—that materially reduced outages and improved developer morale. Will has a strong sysadmin background from roles at 37signals/Basecamp and Engine Yard, and he consults on Rails upgrades and database tuning, bringing hands-on fixes to core Rails components like ActiveRecord and ActiveJob. An active contributor to the Rails project and other front-end projects, he combines pragmatic production debugging with long-term architectural rework. Based in Stevenage, UK, he is currently open to new contracts and continues to blend operational rigor with developer-focused process improvements.
14 years of coding experience
11 years of employment as a software developer
Github Skills (19)
ruby-rails10
debug10
testing10
rails10
user-interface10
graphical-user-interface10
human-interface10
ruby10
html10
activerecord10
web-development10
javascript9
application-framework9
app-framework9
jscript9
Programming languages (13)
Github contributions (5)
rails/rails
Nov 2015 - Aug 2019
Ruby on Rails
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:8 commits, 10 PRs, 41 comments in 3 years 9 months
Contributions summary:Will primarily contributed to the Rails framework, focusing on bug fixes and improvements to the ActiveJob and ActiveRecord components. Their work involved addressing race conditions in job execution, removing unused code, and resolving issues related to database configurations and data serialization. They also made enhancements to the testing infrastructure, ensuring accurate behavior of the framework's components.
ruby-on-railsrailsframeworkrubymvc
WebpageFX/emoji-cheat-sheet.com
Apr 2012 - Jan 2013
A one pager for emojis on Campfire and GitHub
Role in this project:Front-end Developer
Front-end DeveloperContributions:7 commits in 9 months
Contributions summary:Will primarily contributed to the front-end of the emoji cheat sheet. Their commits focused on adding and updating elements within the `public/index.html` file. They added numerous `/play` commands, suggesting interaction or functionality tied to the user interface. These changes indicate a focus on enhancing the website's features and user experience.
campfireemojiemoticonsone-pagerfont-size
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