Tad Thorley
Senior Software Engineer at SixFifty
Lehi, Utah, United States
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolTad Thorley is a Senior Software Engineer with 15 years of hands-on experience building full-stack web applications and shipping backend systems for startups and enterprise teams. Based in Lehi, Utah, he has a strong Ruby/Rails pedigree and meaningful open-source contributions to prominent projects like graphql-ruby and CanCanCan, where he improved core field/input handling and authorization rules. Tad has a track record of solving domain-specific problems—from automotive contract generation to oil & gas remote data collection—and brings practical product sensibility from roles at companies like Mozy, Acima, and SixFifty. He pairs engineering depth with front-end polish, having also refined UI theming in public CoffeeScript/CSS projects. Known for mentoring and technology evaluation, he blends legacy system modernization with pragmatic feature delivery and robust test improvements.
15 years of coding experience
19 years of employment as a software developer
MS, Business Information Systems, MS, Business Information Systems at Utah State University
English
Stackoverflow
2,024reputation
96kreached
18answers
14questions
rest
top-1%
json
top-5%
Github Skills (25)
ruby-rails10
authorizations10
back-end-development10
testing10
css10
rails10
wpgraphql10
ruby10
rest10
wordpress-graphql10
authorization10
graphql10
graphql-ruby10
json9
ruby-on-rails9
Programming languages (12)
Github contributions (5)
CanCanCommunity/cancancan
Dec 2017 - Oct 2019
The authorization Gem for Ruby on Rails.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:29 commits, 8 PRs, 22 comments in 1 year 10 months
Contributions summary:Tad primarily contributed to the authorization logic within the CanCanCan library. Their work involved modifying core files to update how rules are initialized, adding an 'attributes' parameter to rules, and modifying the permitted_attributes method to handle stronger parameter support. They also addressed bugs related to class-level permissions and improved the test suite.
authorizationruby-on-railscancancanrails
coffeescript-cookbook/coffeescript-cookbook.github.io
Jun 2011 - Jun 2011
CoffeeScript Recipes, Examples and Tutorials
Role in this project:Front-end Developer
Front-end DeveloperContributions:8 commits in 1 day
Contributions summary:Tad focused on styling and theming the website's CSS. They made several changes to the `css/default.css` file, including modifications to colors, font families, and margins. The commits show iterative improvements to the visual presentation, with changes to background colors, link styles, and the addition of syntax highlighting. These adjustments indicate a focus on the overall look and feel of the website.
Find and Hire Top DevelopersWe’ve analyzed the programming source code of over 60 million software developers on GitHub and scored them by 50,000 skills. Sign-up on Prog,AI to search for software developers.