I'm a full-stack developer whose best feature is shipping anyway.
Meet Rae Calder — a developer who treats side projects the way a food critic treats menus: everything gets tried at least once. Rae builds clean, boring-in-a-good-way web software, holds strong opinions about database indexes, and keeps a paper notebook full of bugs that solved themselves on the walk to the kettle.
Building Emberpad and Querybird whenever the day job looks the other way.
Work Experience
Four teams in, still collecting lanyards.
Things I keep shipping
Emberpad
A collaborative markdown scratchpad where dev teams draft RFCs, docs, and meeting notes together — comments included.
Querybird
A visual SQL playground that turns a schema into an explorable map and long queries into shareable snippets.
Shipglass
A deploy-preview dashboard that lines up every branch build with its status, logs, and a one-click rollback.
Open source, in small useful pieces
Ship the side project before it's ready
Perfection is a queue that never drains. Here's the checklist I use to push something public in a weekend without regretting it on Monday.
Read MoreDatabase indexes, explained with a card catalog
The mental model that finally made composite indexes click, plus the three queries worth running before you add any index at all.
Read MoreThe fifth rewrite of this site was the cheapest
What I kept, what I deleted, and why the version you're reading is a single HTML file with no build step.
Read MoreEdge caching for people in a hurry
Cache-Control has six directives you actually need. This is the short version I wish someone had handed me two incidents ago.
Read MoreA year-by-year changelog
2025
2023
2021
2019
Occasionally I say things out loud
Cascade JS Meetup
Small libraries, long lives
Why the packages that survive are the ones that do one thing and refuse to grow. A guided tour through four kilobytes of charting code.
Watch VideoOpen Source Northwest
Maintaining a repo nobody pays you for
Triage habits, saying no kindly, and the hour-a-week routine that keeps a side repo healthy without burning anyone out.
Watch Video