Hey there, I'm Jeremy Brayton, and I have been a professional software developer for over 12 years. I have been married to the marvelous Miranda Brayton since 2013. We live in the lovely town of Woodstock, Georgia, a small suburb of Atlanta. We have two radiant twin girls, Clara and Abby, who'll be three years old on May 18, 2024. They are both absolutely the loves of my life, and I had zero clue I could love anyone as much. We are also cat people with an adorable, charming turd named Mr. Squeaks. I could talk endlessly about things such as time travel in shows or movies, awesome anime or shows I'm watching like Ninja Kamui or Shogun, or games that enamor me, like Elden Ring or Dragon's Dogma 2.
My passion is to create an exceptional developer experience for every team member. I've spent most of my time improving onboarding by shoring up documentation, improving build times, and suggesting tooling alternatives when friction becomes a pain point. I'm a natural firefighter and detective. I sprint toward fires that need all hands, and my troubleshooting skills are methodical (neurotic is another word for it). I've lived a past life in IT, supporting networks, systems, and applications. I'm somewhere between developer and operations but not DevOps per se, though I can understand most environments and hardware given time.
In mid-2020, I became team lead at The RethinkGroup, Inc. by being a subject matter expert over internal systems. I would clear blockers for internal and outsourced team members around deployment quirks or write up extensive documentation, a crucial component to my departure in early March. My coworkers are hugely capable, and the transition has been a testament to our shared accomplishments. I was highly instrumental in the adoption of both Laravel and Vue in 2016 and 2018 over custom PHP and JS.
One particular bit of my resume that could be relevant is that I had uncovered an approach that reduced all GitLab CI jobs from roughly 4 minutes on average to around 1. Faster execution reduced the friction to run tests and deploy by significant margins. I, unfortunately, failed to capture the impact of hundreds of thousands of jobs run over seven years since the introduction. While we used a dedicated Digital Ocean droplet, the savings on compute alone would be substantial. I would love to share the secret of that success by leveraging this Docker image. It turns out that "baking in" OS or framework packages significantly reduces the time to completion, even with extensive caching.
While I can't guarantee those results in every case, even small gains spark joy. Shaving seconds off a build time adds up over many projects at multiple runs per day. If I helped shave a second off tailwind builds, the impact that would have globally is unfathomable.
I'm very eager to dive into getting proficient with Rust. Now that I've tackled Elixir to the point where I feel confident, it is next on my radar. I'm a polyglot that covered Basic, Pascal, C#, JavaScript, PHP, Elixir, and my latest dabbling into Rust. I'm starting to brainstorm changing my site to Next.js as I want more rounded React exposure. Getting my feet wet with Typescript, another language Anders Hejlsberg created (I'm a huge fanboy), is icing on that cake. While that primarily benefits my future, I believe it'll give me a far better understanding of the types of problems you run into developing Tailwind UI templates like Catalyst. I also love the idea of being self-employed as my transition away from Tailwind far into the future should set me up for continued success.
This website was a template I created from scratch for Gridsome, using techniques I gleaned from the exceptional Refactoring UI. I think you may know the people who wrote it. Gridsome was fun to wrangle, but it grew stale quickly. I wrote Beatboard as a toy project to help showcase how I write code to perspective employers, and it helped me land a job. I've also written an Apple Music clone solely to have visibility for the albums I don't have for my favorite artists, including a feature to notify me when albums are released. I'm highly active in Elixir meetup communities while working full-time in Laravel. Laravel will always be my first love, and I'm actively looking for ways to interop between Laravel and Elixir for ML/AI workloads over Python. Elixir's use of the Erlang VM makes it a compelling language for scaling operations workloads.
I made contribution to the Phoenix docs in #1476. Jordan made the change far better and was a pleasure to work with. I've also made a minor contribution to the popular Rustler library only using http_proxy if valid. My computer had both proxy settings set to blank, and I didn't want someone else running into the same issue where compiled assets failed to download. I also made a small contribution to widen the inputs for the authentication in my favorite code notebook, Livebook.
I felt particularly proud of Laravel Valet for Production Domains as I was able to use Laravel Valet to help debug a particularly hairy problem plaguing production. I am always looking for ways to improve my experience with Livebook and help others, like my list of tricks. My journal entries are some of my favorite posts because they force me to constrain to bite-sized topics. When I write novels in Confluence or Jira tickets for my day job, it's nice to reign that in for things I want to recall.
I tried to keep this brief, but hopefully this gives you insight into who I am and how I would contribute to the team. I look forward to hearing from you soon. Thanks for the opportunity.