# Chad Wilken

> Chad Wilken is a Lincoln, Nebraska software engineer who became CompanyCam's first employee in 2015 after meeting founder Luke Hansen at Startup Weekend Omaha. As the startup's founding engineer and early CTO, he replaced its original .NET API with Ruby on Rails, helped rebuild its mobile apps, and wrote about the practical systems behind a contractor photo platform that grew to manage millions of projects and more than a billion photos. Wilken left CompanyCam in January 2026 after nearly eleven years and said he planned to take time off before deciding what to build next.

- **Role:** Former Founding Engineer at CompanyCam; taking time off
- **Organizations:** CompanyCam, Hudl, I2rd
- **Education:** Computer Information Technology, with a computer support focus, Southeast Community College
- **Known for:** Became CompanyCam's first employee and helped turn a contractor photo prototype into a production software platform., Migrated CompanyCam's early API from ASP.NET to Ruby on Rails while preserving existing functionality., Helped rebuild CompanyCam's early iOS and Android applications and later explored React Native to reduce feature gaps across platforms.

## Career timeline

- **2011** — Graduated from Southeast Community College after an internship at a local technology company led to full-time work.
- **2011-2013** — Worked as a software developer at I2rd.
- **2013-2015** — Worked as a software engineer at Hudl and met Luke Hansen through Startup Weekend Omaha.
- **2015** — Joined CompanyCam as its first employee and early CTO/founding engineer.
- **2015** — Documented his migration of CompanyCam's API from ASP.NET to Ruby on Rails.
- **2016** — Wrote about replacing CompanyCam's Xamarin mobile app approach and evaluating React Native for a small engineering team.
- **2022** — Published engineering notes on async Elasticsearch reindexing and Sidekiq request tracking; CompanyCam then held just under 21 million projects.
- **2026** — Left CompanyCam on January 16 after nearly eleven years, saying he would take time off to reflect before choosing his next move.

## Achievements

- Became CompanyCam's first employee and helped turn a contractor photo prototype into a production software platform.
- Migrated CompanyCam's early API from ASP.NET to Ruby on Rails while preserving existing functionality.
- Helped rebuild CompanyCam's early iOS and Android applications and later explored React Native to reduce feature gaps across platforms.
- Published practical engineering articles on large-scale Elasticsearch reindexing and request tracing in Sidekiq.
- Maintains open-source work including CompanyCam's tiptap-ruby and graphql-searchkick projects; his GitHub profile also records a security advisory credit.

## Latest updates

- **2026-05** — Southeast Community College profiled Wilken's path from a first programming class to becoming CompanyCam's first employee after he revisited its Lincoln campus.
- **2026-01** — Wilken left CompanyCam after nearly eleven years and began a period of rest and reflection before choosing his next project.

## Links

- Website: https://companycam.com
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chad-wilken
- GitHub: https://github.com/chadwilken

---

Profile page: https://yespress.io/chad-wilken
Published by YesPress — https://yespress.io
Last updated: 2026-09-27