Joel E. Kemp
Education
Ph.D. coursework in Computer Science, CUNY Graduate Center; Withdrawn in good standing, 09/2008 – 05/2013
M.S. Computer Science (enroute to the Ph.D.), The City College of New York, 05/2013
B.S. Computer Science and Minor in English, The City College of New York, Cum Laude, 09/2003 – 06/2008
Programming Experience
Lead Software Engineer, Spotify, 04/2018 – Present
- Continuing my work as a technical leader building Spotify Ad Studio.
Software Engineer, Spotify, 06/2016 – 04/2018
- Served as a full-stack, technical lead in the development of Spotify Ad Studio: a self-serve advertising platform for small/medium sized businesses. The platform was written in React/Redux, Java, and MySQL.
- Refactored code and teams with the goal of optimizing for the success of the business and products.
- Served as a key team member in scaling the product from zero to millions of dollars in revenue.
- Served as a key team member in designing and implementing multiple payment provider integrations: PayPal, Adyen, and the Spotify payment stack.
- Served as a core team member in the design and architectural review of numerous key features/systems powering the product and connected applications.
- Mentored less experienced engineers across teams to become more effective engineers and leaders.
- Saw the team grow from a handful of people to many teams with 50+ people contributing.
JavaScript Engineer, Bēhance team at Adobe Systems, 04/2014 – 04/2016
- Co-authored and maintained a rewrite of the front-end for the Bēhance project editor – powering all content creation on the Behance.net and Adobe Portfolio web applications using a combination of Ractive.js and internal frameworks.
- Spearheaded and implemented JavaScript build process optimizations cutting deployment build times by about 50%.
- Mentored junior team members: teaching them advanced JavaScript concepts and instilling best practices in software development.
- Authored and open sourced a number of tools and libraries used in production.
Software Engineer, YouNow, 10/2013 – 01/2014
- Led all JavaScript development: architecting various Backbone.js (both client and server-side rendered) apps and building the front-end infrastructure for the site’s migration from Flash to HTML5 technologies.
- Authored and open sourced a number of production-quality jQuery and Backbone.js plugins.
- Championed and co-led the company’s migration from SVN to Git.
- Implemented reports-centric, database optimizations in MySQL shaving off 30% CPU load.
- Built a custom, backend event-tracking tool for analyzing the product’s virtual economy.
Product Development Intern, Codecademy, 06/2013 – 08/2013
- Led the company’s server-side, A/B testing efforts.
- Implemented bug fixes and usability features across the Ruby on Rails technology stack.
- Managed about a dozen volunteer course creators in the production of the Code Year Python Track.
Teaching Experience
Founder, Mr. Joel Kemp’s Programming Lessons, 08/2012 – 08/2015
Python and Front-end web development mentor, Thinkful, 04/2014 – 09/2014
Adjunct Lecturer, New York University, 01/2012 – 05/2013
Adjunct Lecturer, Hunter College, 08/2009 – 02/2012
Adjunct Lecturer, The City College of New York, 08/2009 – 05/2011
Speaking Appearances
“Parallel Uglification” – FullStack Academy, 02/2016
“Navigating codebases using Static Analysis and Node.js” – NodeJS NYC Meetup, 07/2015
“Using Static Analysis to Give Build Tools a Brain” – FullStack Conference, 10/2014
“R.js: A Love Story” – NYCHTML5 Meetup, 10/2014
“Using Grunt to Auto-Generate Gruntfiles” – Powered by JavaScript Conference at Strangeloop, 09/2014
“Using Grunt to Auto-Generate Gruntfiles” – QueensJS Meetup, 08/2014
“Large-Scale JavaScript” – New York University, 05/2014