Joel Van Horn
Head Of Engineering at Rodeo
New York, New York, United States
Summary
🤩
RockstarJoel Van Horn is a New York–based Head of Engineering with 14 years of experience building data- and AI-first platforms. He currently drives technical strategy at Revic AI, architecting an agentic platform with Databricks Medallion architecture, modular LLM-enabled agents, and production-grade ML infrastructure. Previously he led NLP-to-SQL and small-model optimizations for a top-20 financial institution—achieving over 75% query accuracy—and founded engineering firms that delivered real-time analytics, event-sourced systems, and headless e-commerce platforms. Joel blends hands-on systems work with product leadership: he’s an active open-source Ruby contributor who removed ActiveSupport from a major event store, improved dotenv’s multi-line parsing, and helped shape Swagger output for Grape APIs. He’s known for translating cutting-edge LLM research into resource-efficient, auditable production systems and scaling data pipelines with Databricks and Airflow.
15 years of coding experience
24 years of employment as a software developer
English, German
Stackoverflow
16,878reputation
4.9mreached
15answers
1question
authentication
top-5%
javascript
top-1%
Github Skills (37)
javascript10
documentations10
grapesjs10
testing10
event-store10
swagger10
dotenv10
grapejs10
regex10
event-sourcing10
ruby10
api10
database-design10
gr10
regexp10
Programming languages (16)
Github contributions (5)
RailsEventStore/rails_event_store
Mar 2018 - Oct 2019
A Ruby implementation of an Event Store based on Active Record
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:182 commits, 33 PRs, 72 pushes in 1 year 7 months
Contributions summary:Joel primarily focused on refactoring the Ruby Event Store's persistence layer, specifically the integration with a ROM-based database. They removed dependencies on ActiveSupport, moved and renamed read methods, and refactored the `add_to_stream` functionality to improve efficiency. Furthermore, the user implemented JSON/YAML serialization in the adapter's schema.
dddevent-sourcingrailsaggregate-rootcqrs-es
bkeepers/dotenv
Jan 2018 - May 2018
A Ruby gem to load environment variables from `.env`.
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:16 commits, 3 PRs, 14 comments in 3 months
Contributions summary:Joel primarily contributed to improving the `dotenv` Ruby gem, focusing on parsing and handling environment variables from `.env` files. Their work involved modifying the parsing logic to correctly handle multi-line values, escape special characters, and include variables without values. Additionally, the user added tests to validate these parsing improvements and fixed Rubocop offenses. The user also addressed a regression related to how the gem parses comments and includes variables without values.
environment-variablesconfigurationruby-gemdotenvruby
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