Carson Gross /// Senior Software Engineer

Overview

I am a programmer comfortable with both front-end & back-end development. I currently teach at Montana State University.

My primary technical interests are hypermedia and programming languages, but I’m comfortable working in most areas of enterprise systems.

Work Experience

2024 - Present	Founder - HyperMedia Research Group at Montana State University https://hypermedia.cs.montana.edu I founded the HyperMedia Research Group at Montana State in order to support my research in hypermedia.
2020 - Present	Instructor - Montana State University CS Dept. https://www.cs.montana.edu At Montana State, I teach the following classes: CSCI 366 Systems - survey of computing: transistors, assembly, C and up virtual machines & networking CSCI 440 Databases - database practice and theory CSCI 468 Compilers - compilers, targeting JVM bytecode ESOF 322 Software Engineering - modern software development practices (git, CI workflows, TDD, etc.) CSCI 491 Advanced Web Development - hypermedia, scripting, etc. Student Selected Professor of the Year - 2020, 2021, 2022
2020 - Present	Principal - Big Sky Software https://bigsky.software Big Sky Software provides software consulting services & open source software
April 2023 - June 2030	Fellow - Github Open Source Accelerator https://accelerator.github.com/ Participated in the first class of Github’s new open source accelerator
2012 - 2021	CTO & Co-Founder - LeadDyno https://leaddyno.com Co-founded LeadDyno, an affiliate referral tracking system (acquired in 2021). Full stack development Designed the core data model Designed the job processing model Built intercooler.js for our application front end needs
2006 - 2012	Senior Staff Engineer - Guidewire Software https://guidewire.com At Guidewire Software I worked on Guidewire’s internal Java-based platform Worked on a custom, JSF-inspired web framework (PCF) Worked extensively on gosu, a byte-code compiled scripting language for Guidewire’s enterprise systems Member of the technical SWAT team, brought in when a product was in trouble or had particularly challenging technical issues Full-stack enterprise Java development: SQL tuning, caching, performance analysis, testing, etc.

Open Source Projects

htmx	A popular alternative front end library that uses AJAX and hypermedia to enable more sophisticated user interfaces at a fraction of the complexity of Single Page Application (SPA) libraries like React
fixi	A minimalist generalized hypermedia controls library
_hyperscript	An event-oriented scripting language for web development. Built to complement htmx, and inspired by HyperTalk, the scripting language for HyperCard
idiomorph	A DOM-morphing algorithm akin to Morphdom, that uses id sets to achieve more stable DOM-morphing behavior with fewer IDs in a document. Now used by 37Signals as a core feature of Hotwire, the standard front end library for Ruby on Rails.
missing.css	A CSS framework that minimizes DOM intervention needed to achieve good styling and layout, with an emphasis on ARIA-driven styling, sponsored by Big Sky Software
intercooler.js	The predecessor to htmx
jschema	A schema mechanism for JSON
gosu	A byte-code compiled scripting language for the JVM

Skills

I am comfortable with the following:

Web & Cloud Development: I founded LeadDyno, a SaaS product, built in Ruby on Rails and deployed on AWS, with the usual back-end components: MySQL/PostGreSQL, Redis, S3, etc. I have created and maintain two alternative front end libraries, htmx and its predecessor intercooler.js. I also created an alternative front end scripting language, hyperscript
SQL & Databases: I have worked with databases for 20+ years, and I teach the database class at MSU
Java & The JVM: I worked on a JVM programming languages and teach the compilers class at MSU, which targets JVM Bytecode
Testing: I have long experience with testing, although I have a perhaps idiosyncratic take on the topic.
Software Patterns: I teach the software patterns class at MSU, including development methodologies such as agile, continuous integration, testing, etc.
Programming Languages: I have built multiple compilers and studied programming languages in graduate school.

Book

Hypermedia Systems: A self-published book co-authored with Adam Stepinski & Deniz Akşimşek that explores how to build distributed software on top of a hypermedia system like the web. The book covers the conceptual ideas of hypermedia, with a focus on the web, then shows how to use htmx and Hyperview to build Hypermedia-Driven Applications

Selected Papers & Essays

Hypermedia Controls: Feral to Formal (ACM HT'24) - https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3648188.3675127
Preserving REST-ful Visibility Of Rich Web Applications With Generalized Hypermedia Controls (ACM SIGWEB Newsletter, Autumn’24) - https://hypermedia.cs.montana.edu/papers/preserving-restful.pdf
HATEOAS — An Alternative Explanation - https://htmx.org/essays/hateoas/
The Hypermedia-Driven Application Architecture - https://htmx.org/essays/hypermedia-driven-applications/
Locality of Behaviour (LoB) - https://htmx.org/essays/locality-of-behaviour/
HATEOAS is for Humans - https://intercoolerjs.org/2016/05/08/hatoeas-is-for-humans.html
The API Churn/Security Trade-off - https://intercoolerjs.org/2016/02/17/api-churn-vs-security.html
The Grug Brained Developer - https://grugbrain.dev/

Selected Interviews & Talks

Return To Hypermedia: Solving Javascript Fatigue Using Fundamental Web Architecture - https://youtu.be/LRrrxQXWdhI
htmx - Clean, Dynamic HTML Pages on Talk Python - https://youtu.be/4wjqsPtj2QY
Simple, Fast Frontends With htmx on PyCharm by JetBrains - https://youtu.be/cBfz4W_KvEI
htmx: Writing JavaScript to Avoid Writing JavaScript on JetbrainsTV - https://youtu.be/u2rjnLJ1M98
REST, HATEOAS & Django at DjangoCon US 2021 - https://youtu.be/u2rjnLJ1M98

Academic Record

2004–2005	*Stanford University, Masters of Science in Computer Science. Palo Alto, California* Emphasis on Programming Languages
1994–1999	*University of California, Berkeley, Bachelor of Science in Industrial Engineering. Berkeley, California* Graduated With Honors Alpha Pi Mu – Industrial Engineering Honor Society

Personal Interests

skiing, baseball, technology, economics, philosophy, comedy.