Jade Michael Thornton

Hi there!

I'm a software engineer, hobby aerial photographer and RC flight enthusiast. I know some things about some software, and a lot about taking care of house rabbits. My favorite language is Clojure, but I never get to work in it. I'm currently a senior software engineer and team lead at DroneDeploy, working on enhancing information discoverability as well as unification with a recently-acquired startup.

I've previously worked and studied at FlightAware (a Collins Aerospace company), Thomson Reuters, Maverick Software, the Humphrey School of Public Affairs, the University of Minnesota and Saint Paul College.

Some other links include: my GitHub and GitLab profiles, my blog posts, some online tools, my LinkedIn profile, and some photos I took.

Memento mori.

Javascript disabled? Dope, I like you. The only JS on this page is for analytics, and you're not missing anything by not running it. Some other pages in this site need JS to fetch data, but you'll be fine.

My Projects

What I cannot create, I do not understand
— Richard Feynman

All of my projects are open source and live on GitLab and/or GitHub. Here's some of my favorite highlights.

Emacs tools and configuration

I use Emacs every day and love it, and I've put care and effort into crafting my development environment to a high level of productivity. Besides my refined Emacs configuration, I authored several packages such as el2md, Rivet mode and several more.
http-server and its dependencies

I've been the de facto lead developer of http-server for a while, though it unfortunately takes a back seat to my career and the rest of my life. I'm also a contributor to its dependencies, including union and http-proxy.
Themes and more themes

I have a desire for everything I use to look good and work well. To that end, I often create or contribute to themes of various types, including Aero (Emacs), Vero (Zsh), ClearNight (Atom, RIP) and Unbroken (GTK3). I was also part of the creation of the mini.css framework.

This site's design is based on my Aero Emacs theme.
Languages

I have a penchant for esoteric languages and the lessons of language design they provide. I maintain and have made minor contributions to Orson, which was created by James Moen.

I've also explored writing my own languages, though I've never completed one. Some of my half languages include Warbler, Brewlisp and Spider.
Tools and utilities

I authored Zpico (a tiny Zsh plugin manager) and I always look out for more opportunities. Though I haven't published it in it's own package, my Aero Emacs configuration contains a GPT Assistant mode.
Education

I enjoy teaching and mentoring new developers, and I have contributed to both FreeCodeCamp lessons and Learn X in Y minutes.
Other contributions

Falling into the "other" category, I'm one of the authors of Armadietto (a reference RemoteStorage server) and a contributor to Formative (a Clojure web form renderer), Alacritty (a terminal emulator), Brave Browser (prior to the 1.0 release), Tohil (a TCL-Python integration library) and Zplug (a Zsh plugin manager).