William Johnston
Developer Growth Leader at Redis
Portland, Oregon, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolWilliam Johnston is a Developer Growth Leader based in Portland with 11 years of professional experience and two decades of hands-on building across startups and enterprise engagements. He blends developer advocacy and product engineering—having led developer growth at Redis and built headless CMS and frameworks as a co-founder—while contributing to notable open-source projects like Faust.js, where he implemented WP headless plugins and REST API auth endpoints. His background spans cloud-native migrations, DevOps, and full-stack web systems (Node.js, TypeScript, Azure/AWS), with measurable outcomes such as dramatic cost and latency reductions and faster onboarding. A former bootcamp CTO and senior solution engineer, he couples curriculum and content creation with pragmatic architecture work that turns manual tools into scalable APIs. Quietly, he pairs deep low-level skills from an electrical engineering education with a knack for developer experience, making complex systems feel approachable for teams and users.
11 years of coding experience
13 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor of Science - BS, Electrical Engineering, Bachelor of Science - BS, Electrical Engineering at Georgia Institute of TechnologyYorktown High School
Stackoverflow
4,363reputation
943kreached
61answers
8questions
npm
top-1%
Github Skills (17)
npm10
apidoc10
plugin-development10
wordpress10
php10
api10
headless-cms10
rest-api10
nodejs10
javascript9
react9
angularjs6
typescript6
jquery6
asynchronous6
Programming languages (18)
Github contributions (5)
wpengine/faustjs
Nov 2020 - Oct 2021
Faust.js™ - The Headless WordPress Framework
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:146 reviews, 121 commits, 183 PRs in 11 months
Contributions summary:William contributed to building a Headless WordPress framework by adding and modifying PHP files related to plugins and API functionality. The commits indicate the implementation of a wp-headless plugin, WP API package integration, and the creation of REST API endpoints for authorization. The user's work also involved setting up settings and configurations for API secret keys and frontend URIs.
reactwordpress-frameworkwordpressjavascriptfaust
wpengine/headless-docs
Nov 2020 - Oct 2021
***Deprecated ***WP Engine Headless Documentation for Developers
Contributions:59 reviews, 303 commits, 51 PRs in 10 months
for-developerswordpressheadless
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