Thomas Calloway

I enjoy helping projects of all kinds to move forward, solving a wide variety of problems, and producing well-tested code that is clean and thoughtful and that keeps paths open for future extension. Though most of my recent years have been spent building within the Elixir and Phoenix/LiveView ecosystem, I also have many years of experience with Ruby on Rails.

I use a Lean perspective when planning a project and writing code, keeping a reasonable balance between short-term and long-term and between perfection and achievable greatness, as I explore the solution space iteratively. I have made a special study of software development productivity analysis and improvement, so I have insights and techniques to contribute from that domain.

Over many years I have built internal and external B2B and B2C Full-Stack Web apps and Backend APIs for small companies, startups, and large organizations in the Advertising, Marketing, Education, Meal Kit, Health and Fitness, Accounting, Finance, Government, and International HR spaces.

Along with that experience, my thinking was also shaped by the degrees I earned in Chemical Engineering and Computer Science, which formed an outlook that combines an engineer’s calculated pragmatism with the rigor of theoretical explorations and known methods, including significant exposure to Statistics, Data Mining, and Numerical Methods.

While meticulous with my time and productivity, I value calm thinking, deep work, and a methodical process that also takes intuitive leaps and assesses a range of options, to drive delivery of projects and features.

That ethos is reflected in my ongoing Phoenix LiveView (PETAL) side project, Peak Pace, which captures my research into techniques that go beyond typical Kanban and resource capacity management, to model and effectively optimize the productivity and predictability of business and team processes using BPMN, simulations, and queuing theory. Those same analytical tools are also valuable when diagnosing software application performance.

I’m a U.S. citizen living for now in Portugal, and I have good conversational ability in German.