Dedicated R&D leadership deepens DockYard’s investment in advancing digital product innovation
DockYard, a digital product consultancy specializing in production-ready apps, today announced the appointment of Brian Cardarella to Director of Research & Development (R&D). In this role, he will lead the program expansion and identify more ways for the company to contribute to open-source and digital product communities. Cardarella founded DockYard in 2010 and currently serves as Chairman of the Board.
Over the past six years, DockYard has invested over $6M in R&D and thousands of hours annually to improve web technologies. The company’s R&D efforts have earned it recognition among Fast Company’s list of 100 Best Workplaces for Innovators.
“Our investments have enhanced web technologies–not only used by DockYard–but Fortune 500 companies,” said Jon Lacks, CEO of DockYard. “As Director of R&D, Brian will determine how we can best spearhead change for the technologies and methodologies we believe in.”
“Since day one, DockYard has remained a champion of the open-source community,” said Cardarella. “Our past contributions have empowered developers to create richer web experiences with greater efficiency. As DockYard continues to evolve, we’re eager to explore how we can grow our support for product and design communities.”
The company offers “DockYard Days” to provide employees with one day (eight hours) per week to focus on individual and community growth. With this program, the company has helped to advance the JavaScript ecosystem and server-side technologies. Notable contributions include support for libraries and tooling built around the Elixir programming language such as:
- Phoenix: a web development framework written in Elixir to help developers build rich, interactive web applications quickly and with less code. DockYard supported all new releases following Phoenix 1.0, such as Phoenix.Presence, Phoenix LiveView, LiveDashboard, and Phoenix LiveView Uploads;
- Lumen: a new compiler and runtime for BEAM languages that makes it possible to target web browsers via WebAssembly (rather than run on a virtual machine), compile code to static binaries, and potentially lower startup times and file sizes for deploying where the BEAM might fit poorly;
- IntelliJ Elixir: an Elixir plugin for JetBrains–like IntelliJ IDEA, PhpStorm, PyCharm, RubyMine, WebStorm–that allows users to drill down and understand exactly what code the BEAM is running. IntelliJ Elixir helps developers to quickly understand frameworks like Ecto, Phoenix and Absinthe;
- COBOLtoElixir: a new transpiler developed to take code written in the COBOL language and translate it to Elixir to make it easier to modernize outdated systems; and many more projects designed to advance web development for all.
Cardarella founded DockYard to help companies use innovative technology to build digital products that scale with them. With more than 20 years of experience in software engineering, he previously held roles with the Democratic National Committee, Zendesk, and Rakuten.
About DockYard
DockYard is a digital product consultancy specializing in production-ready apps that scale wonderfully as companies grow. We offer a range of consulting services with capabilities in product planning, design, user experience (UX), full-stack engineering, and QA. Over the last decade, DockYard has solved complex product challenges for visionary companies like Netflix, Apple, Nasdaq, and Harvard. We’re also dedicated to advancing open-source web development technologies, such as libraries and tooling built around the Elixir programming language. From idea to impact, DockYard empowers ambitious teams to build for the future. Visit us at www.dockyard.com.
