👋

Hi, I'm Joe Van Dyk

CTO • Product Builder • Sharing Knowledge & Learning Together

20+

Years Experience

Years at Crowd Cow

CTO

Since 2015

About Joe

I'm a senior engineering leader with 20+ years of experience shipping revenue-generating products that people love to use.

As CTO at Crowd Cow since 2015, I've built and scaled our custom Rails marketplace from startup to a thriving business. Before that, I was CTO at Tanga (2007-2015) and did embedded software at Boeing (2004-2007).

My deep domain expertise spans Ruby on Rails, Elixir/Phoenix, AWS/Kubernetes, recommender systems, and LLMs. On the business side, I have extensive experience in e-commerce operations, shipping logistics, inventory management, and customer support systems. I'm passionate about building teams, sustainable food tech, and creating transparent remote culture.

I'm at my best when I'm growing teams and individuals. Over the past decade I've scaled engineering orgs from a two-person skunkworks to fully distributed squads spanning five time-zones, all while keeping a bias-for-action and a culture of psychological safety. Mentoring, pairing, and championing developer happiness are non-negotiables for me—happy teams ship better products, faster.

Key Wins

Here are some of the biggest impacts I've driven throughout my career

Built Platform from Zero to Scale

Architected and built Crowd Cow's entire marketplace platform, scaling from startup to serving customers nationwide.

Years Leading Tech

Built ML Ranking Pipeline

Designed machine learning system that lowered CAC by 18% and raised AOV by 12% through personalized recommendations.

-18%

CAC

+12%

AOV

Zero-Downtime Migration

Migrated Rails monolith to microservices on EKS with zero downtime and 50% faster deployments.

Downtime Minutes

Featured Projects

A selection of projects I've built, from enterprise platforms to fun side projects

devbox — Claude Code command center

iPhone-first command center for parallel Claude Code agents. Spawn N Claudes in isolated devcontainers and ship from your phone.

TypeScriptDockerClaude Code

Fix It First

Hear what's broken before it lands on Yelp. Customers report issues in seconds, you triage in one inbox.

RailsTailwind CSSStripe

Crowd Cow Marketplace

Scaled custom Rails marketplace to 10M+ annual visitors

Ruby on RailsReactPostgreSQL

ML Ranking Pipeline

Built ML ranking system that lowered CAC by 18% and raised AOV by 12%

PythonTensorFlowRuby on Rails

Shopify Fulfillment Admin

Custom fulfillment solution integrating Shopify with warehouse management systems

Ruby on RailsGraphQLShopify API

Seattle Walking Tour - Last Of Us

See how the Last of Us game was filmed in Seattle, and take a walk in Joel and Ellie's footsteps

AstroTailwind CSSTypeScript

QR Code Generator

QR Code Generator on your Phone's Lock Screen - instantly accessible QR codes

ElixirPhoenix LiveViewTailwind CSS

Daily Reminders

Simple daily reminder system to help you build habits and stay organized

ElixirPhoenix LiveViewPostgreSQL

AI You Can Use

Educational platform teaching practical AI applications

ElixirPhoenixPostgreSQL

Tanga E-commerce Platform

Built and scaled daily deals platform as CTO (2007-2015)

Ruby on RailsPostgreSQLRedis

Life Outside Code

When I'm not building products, you'll find me training or exploring the Pacific Northwest

🏃‍♂️

Half-Ironman Training

Currently training for my first half-ironman triathlon. The discipline and endurance mindset applies perfectly to long-term product development. Follow my training progress on Strava.

🐕

Best Adventure Buddy

🏖️

Pacific Coast

Joe hiking in the Pacific Northwest mountains

🏔️

Mountain Adventures

🏕️

Weekend Escapes

Honestly? I'd love to hear from you.

Whether you want to chat about tech, collaborate on something cool, or just say hi

Or connect via