Rockwell Windsor Rice

Rockwell Windsor Rice is a full-stack software engineer with over 10 years of professional experience building scalable, production-grade web applications. Specializing in Ruby on Rails,  JavaScript, and Next.js, he has worked across the entire software development lifecycle—from initial requirements gathering and architecture design to deployment, monitoring, and ongoing optimization. His expertise spans both backend development (API design, database optimization, background job processing) and frontend engineering (responsive UI/UX, modern JavaScript frameworks, accessibility standards). Whether working solo on early-stage products or collaborating within large distributed teams on government contracts, Rockwell brings a pragmatic, results-driven approach to solving complex technical challenges.

Throughout his career, Rockwell has demonstrated a track record of delivering measurable impact. As the sole engineer at Levee Labs for six years, he maintained multiple client applications from the ground up, managing everything from cloud infrastructure (AWS, GCP) to database administration (PostgreSQL, MySQL, MongoDB). He reduced company expenditures by 42.5% through strategic AWS cost optimization, integrated enterprise marketing platforms (HubSpot, Pardot), and built accessible, WCAG-compliant frontends in close collaboration with designers and stakeholders. In his government contracting work with Oddball and Technatomy on the VA Lighthouse project, Rockwell has modernized mission-critical APIs serving hundreds of thousands of veterans daily. He restored a failing nightly test suite to 95% reliability, mentored new developers through pair programming and code reviews, and refactored legacy systems to improve maintainability and reduce technical debt. His work involves close collaboration with cross-functional teams, building robust RESTful APIs and maintaining production systems with tools like Datadog, Sidekiq and Redis.

Beyond hands-on development, Rockwell is passionate about education and continuous learning. He served as a Session Lead at Udacity from 2021 to 2023, delivering weekly live instruction to 200+ students across multiple cohorts in the Front End Developer Nanodegree program, covering HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Git, and modern development workflows. He has built custom tooling to improve his own productivity (including a Claude AI plugin for Sublime Text) and stays current with emerging technologies like AI-assisted development (current favorite is Claude Code). Rockwell holds an Active Public Trust security clearance and thrives in remote-first, collaborative environments where he can contribute to meaningful projects, mentor teammates, and continuously refine his craft as a software engineer.