Don Morrison
Director Of Engineering at MapLight
Reno, Nevada, United States
Summary
🤩
RockstarDon Morrison is a seasoned engineering executive with 17 years of experience who currently leads engineering at MapLight, building data-driven civic transparency products. A developer-first director and former co-founder of a profitable consulting firm, he combines hands-on Ruby/Rails backend expertise — including performance and refactor work on notable open-source projects like Virtus and ClosureTree — with a track record of scaling teams and delivering operational reliability such as zero-downtime rollouts. Known for a lead-from-the-front, empathic management style, he excels at converting ambiguous problems into prioritized roadmaps and cross-stakeholder alignment. Based in Reno, he pairs pragmatic, business-focused technology with disciplined personal practices like aikido that inform his calm approach to leadership.
17 years of coding experience
24 years of employment as a software developer
Stackoverflow
31reputation
1kreached
0answers
1question
Github Skills (14)
activerecord10
configuration-management10
ruby-rails10
metaprogramming10
rails510
rails10
sql10
ruby10
database-optimization9
testing9
documentations8
documentation8
api-design8
google-bigquery6
Programming languages (11)
Github contributions (5)
solnic/virtus
May 2013 - Oct 2013
[DISCONTINUED ] Attributes on Steroids for Plain Old Ruby Objects
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:26 commits, 2 comments in 5 months
Contributions summary:Don primarily focused on enhancing the `Virtus` library, an attribute management system for Ruby objects. Their contributions included implementing a module builder for creating custom Virtus modules, which involved configuration and coercion options. They also refactored and documented the library, addressing global configuration settings and deprecating obsolete methods. The user's work involved core changes to the library's structure and functionality.
rubysteroidsdry-rbdiscontinuedplain
ClosureTree/closure_tree
Dec 2012 - Dec 2012
Easily and efficiently make your ActiveRecord models support hierarchies
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:6 commits in 1 day
Contributions summary:Don focused on optimizing the `hash_tree` method within the ClosureTree library. Their contributions include refactoring database queries to improve performance, specifically by eliminating self-joins and using inner joins. They also implemented the use of `build_nested_hash` for creating hash trees and addressed self-references within the hierarchies. Furthermore, the user worked on applying the use of a computed column.
closure-treerailsdescendantshierarchiesancestry
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