Karl Stolley

Summary

I’m a front-end web developer with deep engineering commitments to open standards, accessibility, and documentation. As a former university professor who recently shifted to an industry career, I have a record of technical publications and open-source contributions that reveal my skills as an engaging communicator, generous collaborator, and champion of the web platform and its native browser APIs.

Experience

Daily, www.daily.co (remote)

  1. Senior Engineer

    • 2022
    • Maintained code supporting product documentation (React, Next.js) and company blog (Ghost Pro)
    • Revised and expanded product documentation to ensure concord with product API features in production
    • Reviewed pull requests on production code and documentation maintained in a monorepo, and demo code maintained in separate repos
    • Prepared a 90-minute online workshop to showcase the Daily Prebuilt product to an audience of external developers
    • Coached and offered editorial feedback to engineer-writers in the preparation of technical blog posts
    • Collaborated effectively and asynchronously with coworkers from across the globe

Illinois Institute of Technology, www.iit.edu (Chicago, IL)

  1. Associate Professor of Information Technology and Management (tenured)

    • 2016–2022
    • Created and taught original web-specialization courses on front-end development, Ruby on Rails, RESTful data API design & consumption, and Node.js
    • Structured courses in web development to emphasize agile development backed by version control (Git) and automated testing (Mocha, Test::Unit), as well as visual regression testing (BackstopJS)
    • Coached student engineers in writing commit messages, inline documentation, and release notes as well as effective use of synchronous and asynchronous communication channels (Basecamp, Discord, Slack)
    • Developed and taught new courses that were adopted as the department standard for other instructors to follow, including Fundamentals of Web Development, Human-Computer Interaction and Web Design, and Web Systems Integration (microservices and APIs)
    • Delivered classroom instruction, interacted, and collaborated with fully remote students and student teams via synchronous and asynchronous communication channels
    • Advised and coached students from various computational disciplines engaged in graduate- and undergraduate-level research and programming projects—including fielding technical questions about codebases and languages outside my core expertise

  2. Associate Professor of Digital Writing & Rhetoric (tenured)

    • 2012–2021

    Assistant Professor of Technical Communication

    • 2007–2012
    • Taught a two-course sequence in standards-based web design and web application fundamentals (HTML, CSS, vanilla JS; Ruby on Rails) to students without programming backgrounds
    • Created and offered courses on information architecture, knowledge management, and technical editing
    • Advised and directed thesis or capstone projects for approximately 50 masters students and 15 PhD students
    • Designed, installed, and maintained a 20-workstation instructional computer lab and backing server in collaboration with university librarians (triple-booted into Windows, macOS, and Ubuntu Linux)
    • Administered and maintained departmental Linux servers for internal information-sharing and email lists

Purdue University, www.purdue.edu

  1. Webmaster, Purdue Online Writing Lab (OWL)

    • 2005–2007
    • Designed, developed, and maintained a custom content management system on the LAMP stack
    • Ensured site accessibility via user-testing and assessed conformance with Section 508 and WCAG, Level Double-A
    • Achieved and maintained number-one Google SEO result for writing

  2. Graduate Teaching Assistant

    • 2000–2007
    • Designed and taught original courses in web design and development; multimedia authoring and video production; technical writing; business communication; introductory writing
    • Enrolled in four semester-long graduate-level teaching practicums to develop formal command of instructional methods and their underlying theories of learning and education

Community and Open-Source Contributions

  1. Pragmatic Programmers

    • 2016–present
    • Served as a technical reviewer for numerous books, including Trevor Burnham’s Asynchronous JavaScript, Faraz Kelhini’s Modern Asynchronous JavaScript and High-Performance Text Processing, and Erica Sadun’s Numerical Brain Teasers

  2. Mozilla Developer Network (MDN)

    • 2016–present
    • Served as open-source contributor to MDN’s best-in-industry documentation, browser compatibility data, and code for interactive examples

Freelance Web Development & Consulting

  1. The Newberry Library Digital Collections for Classroom Use

    • 2011–2013
    • Developed and deployed to production a custom Ruby on Rails application to replace POC developed on Omeka
    • Integrated with the Dropbox API to enable Chicago Public School teachers to build custom lesson plans around The Newberry’s digital resources
  2. McGraw-Hill (consulted on educational digital-resource delivery, 2010)
  3. Illinois Tech Research Institute (IITRI; consulted on web accessibility, 2009)
  4. Illinois Tech Banner Web Group (consulted on ethical, accessible search-engine optimization, 2008)

Recent Writing, Talks, and Interviews

Books

Articles & Blog Posts

Presentations

Interviews

Education

  • PhD, Purdue University. West Lafayette, IN.
  • MA, Purdue University. West Lafayette, IN.
  • BA, Millikin University. Decatur, IL.

Selected Skills

  • Web platform: HTML, CSS, JavaScript; ARIA, ARIA in HTML, WCAG, Section 508; real-time Web APIs: WebSockets, WebRTC, Web Components. Preprocessors: Haml, Less, Sass/SCSS, CoffeeScript. Responsive design; intrinsic design; progressive web applications (PWAs). Progressive enhancement. Accessibility. User-centered design. User experience.
  • Web frameworks and servers: Node.js, Express.js, Socket.io, PM2. Ruby, Sinatra, Ruby on Rails, Puma. Jekyll, Hugo. Apache, Nginx.
  • Development environments and tools: Unix/Linux, macOS. Git, GitHub. Subversion. Notion, Linear, Bugzilla. TravisCI. Markdown.
  • Design and video-production tools: Figma, Pixelmator, Concepts. Final Cut Pro.
  • Writing and editorial: The Chicago Manual of Style; Garner’s Modern English Usage.