Joshua Rogan.
Personal Portfolio Engineering & Side Projects

Senior Engineering Manager · JWX

Building teams,
and building things for the people I love.

Hands-on engineering leader with 16 years building consumer-facing platforms and seven years leading distributed teams. I set technical direction for shared UI foundations, reliability, performance, developer experience, and cross-platform clients at billions-of-plays scale. Off the clock, I build ambitious products for friends and family.

Projects LinkedIn GitHub Photography
Joshua Rogan
01 / Selected Work

Things I’ve built for fun.

A running collection of side projects — most of them born from a love of baseball, a soft spot for teaching kids, or the simple urge to make something useful for my family. All designed, built, and shipped by me.

01
Official MLB API LLMs / AI Fantasy

Dingers — MLB Fantasy League ↗

A fantasy baseball league with a brain of its own.

A completely custom-built fantasy league for a tight-knit group of friends — no off-the-shelf platform, every rule and scoring wrinkle built from scratch. It pulls live data straight from the official MLB APIs, so standings, box scores, and player stats update with the real season.

What makes it different: advanced AI and LLMs power the personality of the league — generating matchup previews, weekly recaps, playful trash talk, and narrative storylines on top of a deep layer of detailed, sabermetric-flavored stats. It turns a spreadsheet of numbers into a living, fun environment that feels like its own little corner of the baseball internet.

Visit Dingers
02
Elo Ratings Monte Carlo Predictive Modeling

MLB Power Rankings & Predictions ↗

FiveThirtyEight’s playbook, rebuilt for every MLB team.

A standings-prediction engine modeled on the classic 538 / FiveThirtyEight methodology. Each team carries a dynamic Elo power rating that rises and falls game-by-game based on opponent strength, margin, and home-field — a single number that captures who’s actually good right now, not just who got lucky.

From there it runs thousands of Monte Carlo simulations of the rest of the season to produce projected win totals, division-title odds, wild-card chances, and full playoff probabilities. The result is a data-driven, constantly updating crystal ball for the entire league — the kind of analytical rigor front offices pay for, built as a labor of love.

View the rankings
03
Finance Data Education Data Viz

Stocks for Kids ↗

Gifting investments — and a head start on financial literacy.

When I give stock to the kids in my family as a gift, this is how we track it. Stocks for Kids turns each gift into a simple, friendly dashboard where a child can watch the value of their shares grow over time, see how the market moves, and start to understand compounding and ownership long before a finance class ever gets to them.

It pulls real market pricing to keep portfolios current and presents it in language and visuals a kid can actually follow — making an abstract concept feel personal, tangible, and a little bit magical every time the number ticks up.

See how it works
04
Geography Kid-Safe No Ads

Geo — A Geography Game for Kids ↗

Learn the world and the 50 states. No ads, ever.

An interactive geography game built so kids can learn world and U.S. geography through play — locating countries, capitals, and states in a clean, encouraging interface. It’s designed to reward curiosity and make memorization feel like a game instead of a quiz.

Most importantly, it’s completely free of ads and tracking. I built it because I wanted my own kids and family to have a safe, distraction-free place to learn — no pop-ups, no upsells, no creepy data collection. Just geography.

Play Geo
05
TypeScript Next.js Deterministic Engine Monte Carlo

Force Projection ↗

A full strategy board game you can play online with friends.

Force Projection is a complete 1–4 player strategy game built as a TypeScript monorepo with a Next.js and React client, an isolated deterministic rules engine, shared validation, online play, and automated opponents.

Seeded simulations and a Monte Carlo balance harness test faction win rates, strategy viability, and snowballing across thousands of automated games. The digital prototype is now evolving toward a physical board game through playtesting.

Play Force Projection
06
Photography Small Business Portfolio

Rogan Photography ↗

The side of me that lives behind the lens.

The home for my personal photography business — a curated portfolio of the work I shoot on the side. Photography is one of my favorite ways to slow down and pay attention, and this site is where that work lives and where clients can find me.

From editing in Lightroom to building the site itself, it’s a fully self-run little business and creative outlet.

View the gallery
07
Astronomy Weather API Dark Skies

Milky Way Tonight ↗

Should I drive to a dark-sky site tonight? Hour by hour.

A practical guide for catching the galactic core from northeastern Pennsylvania. It scores hour-by-hour viewing conditions for Clarks Summit and five nearby dark-sky sites — cloud cover, darkness, and when the Milky Way is actually above the horizon — so you know whether it’s worth packing the camera and heading out.

Forecasts come straight from api.weather.gov, with live satellite cloud cover and radar layered on top as a last-minute gut check before you drive. Built for the nights when clear skies and a dark ridge line are all you need.

Check tonight’s skies
02 / Career

Work experience.

Sixteen years building software and seven years leading engineering organizations — from full-stack consulting to UI platforms behind hundreds of millions of users and billions of video plays.

JW Player / Connatix (now JWX)
2023 — Present
Sr. Engineering Manager
  • Lead and grow a distributed organization of 10 engineers across the US and Europe, including an engineering manager responsible for native iOS and Android libraries. Set technical direction for shared UI foundations, client APIs, reliability, performance, and developer experience across video players powering billions of monthly plays.
  • Cut mean time to release for a large, mature client platform from 20 days to approximately 3 — about an 85% reduction — establishing a credible path to continuous deployment and enabling faster, lower-friction delivery.
  • Separated engineering observability from product analytics, enabling engineers to add metrics and operational dimensions quickly, diagnose production issues in real time, and control data costs.
  • Own the TypeScript and JavaScript browser player, native wrappers, and monetization systems spanning ad scheduling, RPM, and CPM; turned an ambiguous growth mandate into an A/B-test backlog and aligned product and engineering execution.
  • Led end-to-end delivery of JWX Studio Transformation Agents across backend APIs and publisher-facing frontend workflows, using generative AI to turn articles into audio, podcasts, and video and transform video for vertical channels; adopted by publishers including Forbes.
  • Drove technical integration across the 2024 JW Player–Connatix merger and the 2026 Aug X Labs and True Anthem acquisitions, partnering closely with CTOs and engineering leaders to integrate teams and systems, align roadmaps, and reuse capabilities across the combined companies.
  • Designed and implemented a company-wide engineering calibration cycle to standardize leveling expectations, drive transparent assessments, and support talent development across the org.
  • Built an LLM-powered knowledge Slackbot and AI-assisted async-standup dashboard that expose cross-team work and delivery bottlenecks; serve as publisher-department AI ambassador, driving practical experimentation for globally distributed teams.
Fandom
Jul 2016 — 2023
Engineering Manager · 2019–2023
  • Led nine engineers across three teams focused on discovery, video, experimentation, and engagement for products serving 300M monthly unique visitors.
  • Set and executed a shared frontend-platform strategy across a video hub, news aggregator, TV recommendation experience, editorial products, and other consumer applications, standardizing tooling and technology across three teams.
  • Expanded client-side performance and observability strategy, giving engineers faster access to operational metrics while partnering with product and engineering leadership on long-term platform investments.
  • Hired global talent and developed engineers into leadership roles through individualized coaching and business-aligned growth plans.
Staff Engineer · 2016–2019
  • Technical lead for a browser experimentation platform, a client-side data-management toolkit for personalization, and the video platform.
  • Built a fast-to-market editorial platform and Fandom’s React replacement of MediaWiki.
  • Unified client-side performance and analytics systems and led code-sharing groups for new technology and engineering patterns.
Shipped Centralized Content App (2023) Canonical Video Platform (2022) Trivia App (2022) TV Recommendation App (2021) Editorial Platform (2020) MediaWiki Platform
Fireman Creative
Jul 2015 — Jul 2016
Full Stack Software Engineer
  • Independently led several web projects from design to production, collaborating with clients and designers on a consistent look and feel.
  • Generated monthly SEO and analytics reports, and created a new container-based deployment process that greatly sped up development flows.
  • Implemented automated alerts and scripts to restart crashed applications and servers.
Projects AE7 JCC Pittsburgh Conte Design
Pittsburgh Quantum Repository Group
Jan 2015 — Jan 2016
Full Stack Software Engineer
  • Built a Python-powered front-end application to display the largest molecule database, using WebGL for 3D molecule visualizations.
  • Built and maintained a MongoDB server.
Links Database App
Pittsburgh Genetics
Oct 2014 — Jan 2016
Full Stack Software Engineer
  • Built a genetic population simulator web application used by students and professors across the US.
    • Teaching tool adopted across multiple universities.
    • Used multithreaded web workers to speed up simultaneous math calculations.
Links Population Simulator
Independent Consultant
Jan 2010 — Present
Full Stack Software Engineer
  • (2024) Worked with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute building tools for expanding the understanding of genetics.
  • (2014–2019) Worked with professional baseball teams, writers, students, and professors to build web applications.
    • Built a CMS for San Francisco Giants affiliate team player management.
    • Built tools to automate audio uploads for a blogger.
  • (2013) Advised faculty and staff at the University of Scranton as a technical consultant — migrating years of content to a CMS and proposing a Learning Management System.
Links UPMC Study Application
03 / Toolbox

Skill sets.

The tech I reach for across the stack — from frontend and infrastructure to data engineering, analytics, and design.

Working with AI

AI helped me turn projects I had carried for years into real products. I use models from OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, and xAI as engineering and creative collaborators, choosing the right system for the work rather than treating any one model as the answer. I believe this leverage will create far more entrepreneurs and “companies of one” — but only if the systems people build on are reliable, understandable, and worthy of their trust.

OpenAI Google Gemini Anthropic Grok (xAI)
Frontend
JavaScript, TypeScript, React, Next.js, Redux, Webpack, Rollup, Immutable, Styled Components, Yarn, IndexedDB, LocalStorage, streaming video, WebGL, Web Workers.
Backend
Node.js, Java (Gradle, Guice, Jackson, Jersey, Jooq, Liquibase), Python, PHP (Laravel, Composer, WP), RabbitMQ, Memcached, Algolia.
Data / DB
MySQL, MongoDB, GraphQL, Neo4J.
Analytics
Athena, Google Analytics, Mode, Qlik.
Ops
Kubernetes, AWS, GCP, Jenkins, Travis CI, Kibana, Grafana, Prometheus, Varnish Control Language.
AI / LLMs
OpenAI, Google Gemini, Anthropic Claude, Grok (xAI) APIs; prompt engineering, function/tool calling, RAG, embeddings, and agentic workflows — wired into Discord bots, generated children’s books, and MLB apps.
Data Eng / ML
scikit-learn, TensorFlow, Pandas, Jupyter Notebook.
Design
Figma, Zeplin, Sketch, Canva, LucidChart.
Misc
Agile, Jira, Photoshop, Lightroom, Premiere Pro.
Off the Clock
Photography, woodworking, board games, disc golf, and baseball.