I build production software, and lead the teams that ship it. Twenty years in.
I've been writing production software for twenty years, and leading the teams that ship it. I started at UCLA, scaled engineering at B Capital, and now lead application development at the UC Davis School of Veterinary Medicine. My open-source work on Moodle ended up running at 10,000+ institutions, serving 30,000+ users.
What I enjoy most is the part of the job that doesn't fit on a slide: untangling a legacy migration, mentoring an engineer into a tech lead, replacing a fragile prototype with something that runs for years, writing code other people actually want to read. Beneath all of it: I'm drawn to building tools that help people communicate better, from an LMS used by tens of thousands of students to investment workflows that move decisions faster between Finance and Legal.
Based in Chino, California Open to full-time, contract, or short-term projects
TypeScript Astro SQLite LLM Pipeline
A daily local news brief for Chino and Chino Hills, California. Automated ingestion of city council, planning commission, and school board records, synthesized behind mandatory citations and tiered review gates, published as a static site every morning.
SvelteKit TypeScript SQLite RSS
Adds the filtering that Central Casting's job board lacks, so background actors can find the roles they actually qualify for. Narrow by region, union status, gender, age, or keyword, then subscribe to an RSS feed that surfaces new matches as they open.
PowerShell CLI Accessibility
Cross-platform PowerShell CLI that checks Word, Excel, and PowerPoint files for accessibility issues, with no Office installation required. Published to the PowerShell Gallery.
JavaScript Accessibility Web Audit
Accessibility audit across all University of California campus homepages, inspired by the WebAIM Million project. Surfaces WCAG issues to drive systemwide a11y improvements.
SvelteKit TypeScript SQLite
Instant polls for people in the same room. Share a QR or four-letter code, watch results update live, then the poll self-destructs. No accounts, no app install.
Rust Static Analysis CLI Developer Tools
Codebase health analyzer for Rust workspaces that catches what rustc and clippy stay quiet about, including dead module files, unused public items and re-exports, misplaced dependencies, and cfg gates that can never hold.
TypeScript React Vite
Catalog of entrepreneurship programs across all 10 University of California campuses, covering incubators, accelerators, funding, competitions, courses, and maker spaces in one place.
JavaScript MediaPipe WebGPU Zoom
Browser-based speech timer that composites the speaker onto the official Toastmasters virtual background, flooding green, yellow, then red as a speech crosses each threshold. Segmentation runs locally on the webcam feed, and a ready-made video covers anyone who would rather skip the setup.
Swift SwiftUI macOS MAPI
Native macOS app for browsing Microsoft Outlook .pst and .ost files, built on PstReader's pure Swift implementation of the MS-PST specification. Memory-mapped I/O, a convenience API, and faster message loading were contributed back upstream.
Python Flet Personal Finance Desktop App
Day-by-day balance projection from Monarch Money data, flagging low-balance dates before they hit.
Python macOS Accessibility Zoom SSE
Runs Toastmasters Table Topics from a single local command. Reads the Zoom participants panel through the macOS accessibility API, rolls a random speaker, and full-screens the prompt for the whole room. No account, nothing stored on a server.
PHP REST Moodle Zoom API
Moodle plugin (mod_zoom) for scheduling, managing, and launching Zoom meetings directly from a course page.
PHP Open Source Git JIRA
Long-term contributor to the Moodle LMS; recognized as a Particularly Helpful Moodler (top 1% of forum contributors).
Open source contributions
Node.js CLI Windows
Fixed the Node runtime probe in the design-language toolkit so the hooks it generates survive cmd.exe metacharacter parsing and stop failing installs on Windows.
Vue Vite Build Tooling
Upgraded serialize-javascript to v7 across the Vue framework's build chain to clear a security advisory, and opened the Vite plugin's peer range to Vite 8.
Node.js CLI Git Hooks
Added the --continue-on-error flag so one failing task no longer hides the rest of the report, with unit and integration coverage and no change to the default behavior.
Rust PHP Static Analysis WordPress
Brought WordPress security linting to the Rust PHP toolchain with rules for nonce verification, prepared SQL, and input sanitization, validated against production codebases for PHPCS parity.
Rust CSS Minification
Fixed a calc() minification bug that emitted WebKit-invalid output, and turned a parser panic in csskit check into a real diagnostic. This site's CSS is minified with it.
JavaScript Stylelint Accessibility
Replaced a self-referencing plugin path so the accessibility rule set resolves under stylelint 17's ESM loader instead of failing at startup.
Node.js Developer Tools
Replaced hand-rolled backslash escaping with minimatch.escape(), fixing a brace-expansion bug that stripped escape sequences out of path prefixes.
JavaScript Node.js
Corrected nucleus/nuclei pluralization and expanded the uncountable-word list in the JavaScript inflection library.
Python PyTorch Apple Silicon
Ported the local AI photo culling tool to Apple Silicon, adding MPS device detection, unified-memory limits, cross-platform OOM handling, and HEIC support for Apple Photos libraries.
JavaScript Vite Benchmarking
Added Gea to the suite that builds the same app in ten frontend frameworks, as a like-for-like port wired into the existing test, lint, build, and benchmark tooling.
Python MCP OpenAI Gemini
Added gpt-image-2 with flexible custom sizes, gpt-image-1.5 and imagen-4-fast support, provider health checks, and Claude Code MCP compatibility.
Swift tvOS App Store
Modernized an open-source Apple TV Internet Archive browser and prepared it for App Store release.
2025 – Current
School of Veterinary Medicine, UC Davis
2021 – 2025
B Capital
2011 – 2021
Common Collaboration and Learning Environment (CCLE), UCLA
2003 – 2011
SEASnet Computing, HSSEAS, UCLA
July 2026
An onboarding deck created for work, helping new developers get up to speed with agentic coding.
June 2026
My case for optimism about AI and the brighter future it can help us build.
April 2026
How I use AI agents to find and fix web accessibility issues and bring sites up to WCAG 2.2 AA/AAA compliance, shared with the UC Tech group.
March 2026
A UC Tech talk on running AI agents in loops to tackle goals like code review and plan refinement.
February 2026
A tour of the milestones that shaped software development, ending with an optimistic take on where the industry is headed. Given at Toastmasters and UC Tech.
August 2025
What is "vibecoding," exactly? A Toastmasters talk that unpacks the buzzword.
September 2019
A demonstration of our team's Learning Tools Interoperability (LTI) improvements at the 2019 MoodleMoot US conference in Philadelphia.
November 2017
The story of our CCLE summer internship program and how a non-traditional Agile team gained velocity, shared at the 2017 MoodleMoot US conference in Miami.
June 2016
Everything Moodle developers needed to know about PHP 7's features and performance improvements, from the 2016 MoodleMoot US conference in Los Angeles.
August 2015
A workshop introducing Behat, the automated browser based testing framework, at the 2015 MoodleMoot US conference in Minneapolis.
Remote or hybrid. Remote is where I do my best deep work; hybrid keeps the whiteboarding and team-building I'd miss going fully solo. Either way, what matters more is the team: people who push each other's thinking and care about the craft.
Full stack, with the deepest roots in PHP and JavaScript. On the backend that's Node, MySQL and PostgreSQL, REST and SOAP integrations, plus the DevOps glue (Docker, AWS, Jenkins) that keeps things shipping. On the frontend, React, Svelte, Vue, and lately the VoidZero toolchain (Vite, Oxlint, Oxfmt). I've also spent two decades in and around Moodle, both as a contributor and a plugin author.
Collaborative, but with a point of view. I want engineers to own their work and disagree with me when they should; my job is to keep the team's goals aligned with the business, unblock people, and step in with a call when consensus stalls. Mentoring is the part I enjoy most: I've watched a number of interns and junior engineers grow into tech leads, and that's the work I'll still be making time for in any role.
Building and running the CCLE summer internship program at UCLA from 2011 to 2020. Each cohort shipped real work on Moodle: database performance, caching, API design, web services. A lot of those interns are now engineers and tech leads in the industry, and that program is the achievement I'd put first, ahead of anything I can point to on GitHub.
Here is what some of the people I've worked with have said.
One of the most remarkable aspects of Rex's work is his ability to approach problems independently while still collaborating effectively within our team. He consistently produces high-quality solutions that are not only functional but also creative and well-considered. Rex's attention to detail ensures that his work meets or exceeds expectations, and he brings a fresh perspective to challenges we faced.
VP of IT, B Capital
Rex is a one in million quality colleague and human being. I've worked at CCLE for 6 years with him on the Agile team, watching him mentor UCLA students (summer internship) and other developers have repeatedly inspired me.
LMS Support Coordinator/Change Analyst, UCLA
During the time that Rex worked on my team he consistently demonstrated excellent skills as a Technical Lead and as a Developer both on the operations side and in application development. He is able to focus on development objectives and communicates in a clear, patient and effective manner with both non-technical stakeholders and technical team members alike.
CCLE Coordinator, UCLA
If any of that lands, the fastest way to reach me is email. Always open to a conversation.