Joshua Rogan.
Personal Portfolio Engineering & Side Projects

Senior Engineering Manager · JW Player / Connatix

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

Senior engineering leader with over a decade of experience scaling UX engineering organizations, building high-impact frontend and design infrastructure, and leading distributed teams across web and mobile. Off the clock, I build baseball analytics, ad-free games for kids, and tools for my 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
Multiplayer Strategy Online Board Game

Force Projection ↗

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

Force Projection is a complete, detailed online board game — built from the ground up to play with friends across the table or across the country. It captures the depth of a real strategy game: managing resources, positioning, and outmaneuvering opponents turn after turn.

Everything — the rules engine, the board state, the turn flow, and the online play — is custom-built, the product of a genuine love for tabletop game design translated into the browser.

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
02 / Career

Work experience.

A decade-plus building and leading engineering teams — from full-stack consulting to managing distributed organizations behind products used by hundreds of millions of people.

JW Player / Connatix
2023 — Present
Sr. Engineering Manager
  • Manage a distributed team of 10 engineers across the US and Europe — spanning product engineering, UI, and client-side development — building and supporting JW Player’s Web and Mobile video players, which power billions of video plays each month.
  • Drove the technical integration of critical systems and teams during the JW Player–Connatix merger, aligning platforms and workflows across both organizations.
    • Developed an LLM-powered SlackBot to help employees across the newly merged company identify the right person to contact for questions and domain knowledge.
  • Designed and implemented a company-wide engineering calibration cycle to standardize leveling expectations, drive transparent assessments, and support talent development across the org.
  • Worked cross-functionally with product leaders on immediate objectives while coordinating with the VP of Engineering & CTO to lay the groundwork for sustainable platform growth.
  • Served as technical lead on multiple high-impact projects, including the Strategy Rules product — a rules-engine UI designed to optimize video engagement and monetization.
  • Hired top-tier engineers globally and coached high performers into leadership roles with tailored mentorship.
  • Built strong technical relationships with Dotdash Meredith, AP, and the New York Post to support integrations and resolve issues quickly.
Fandom
Jul 2016 — 2023
Engineering Manager · 2019–2023
  • Led complex projects across scalable React front-end applications, data systems, and back-end microservices serving 300M monthly unique visitors.
  • Expanded strategy for performance dashboards and observability on client-side systems.
  • Led a team of 9 engineers focusing on findability, video, and experimentation — delivering high-quality features rapidly against business objectives.
  • Partnered with product leaders on short-term goals while working with the VP of Engineering to build infrastructure for the long term.
  • Executed a strategy to unify the front-end platform with consistent tooling and technology, and hired global talent across multiple departments.
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.

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.
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.