Joel Cano

Full Stack Developer • Ruby on Rails & JavaScript • 15+ years shipping web applications

Hello There!

I’m Joel Cano, a full stack developer with 15+ years of hands-on experience building web applications. I spend my days in Ruby on Rails, JavaScript, and PostgreSQL, and I care most about the part of the job where a hard problem turns into code that other people can read, extend, and trust.

What I Do

I build and maintain production web applications end to end — data model, backend, API, frontend, and the infrastructure they run on. Most of my recent work has been in the telecom space: an MVNO CRM and its supporting APIs, a PBX built on Asterisk, and a telco CRM, all Rails on the backend with Ember.js front ends.

The through-line across all of it is long-lived systems. These are applications that teams depend on daily and that I’ve kept healthy for years, which is where I’ve learned the most about schema design, API boundaries, and how much future pain a clear abstraction saves.

Skills

Languages

  • Ruby
  • JavaScript
  • SQL

Backend

  • Ruby on Rails
  • REST API design
  • PostgreSQL
  • Asterisk (voice/telephony)

Frontend

  • Ember.js
  • Modern JavaScript, HTML & CSS

Infrastructure & Ops

  • AWS
  • Docker
  • Nginx
  • Linux
  • Git

AI-Assisted Development

I work with AI in my daily development loop rather than around it — spec-driven development, where a written specification drives the implementation, has become how I approach non-trivial features.

Tools I actively use: Claude Code, GitHub Copilot, Kiro, and OpenCode.

I’m currently working through the IBM RAG and Agentic AI Professional Certificate, which covers retrieval-augmented generation, vector databases (FAISS, Chroma DB), and embedding-based similarity search.

This Site

This site serves a few purposes:

  1. Writing: Notes on architecture decisions, tooling, and things I learned the hard way
  2. Résumé: An up-to-date résumé you can read online or download as a PDF
  3. Experiments: What I’m currently trying out, including AI-assisted workflows

Tech Stack

This website is built with:

  • Jekyll - Static site generator
  • Minimal Mistakes - Responsive theme, customized with a Tokyo Night palette
  • GitHub Pages - Hosting and CI
  • Markdown & YAML - Content authoring; the résumé renders from a single data file

Let’s Connect

I’m always up for talking shop — architecture, Rails, or how AI is changing the way we write code. If you’re hiring or want to collaborate, the fastest way to reach me is LinkedIn.