# John Rock

Software engineer at dbt Labs based in Vermont. Personal site, projects, and field notes on building for the web.

## About

John Rock is a Web Platform Engineer at dbt Labs, based in Vermont, United States. He has been building on the web since 2008. For the last four years he has been part of the web platform team at dbt Labs, working on design systems, marketing infrastructure, and tools that help teams ship faster. He enjoys solving problems that go beyond code — architecture decisions, team workflows, and tooling that makes everyone around him faster.

- Website: https://johnrock.me
- GitHub: https://github.com/john-rock
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/john-rock
- Location: Vermont, United States

## Projects

### vscimg

- Role: VSCode extension
- URL: https://vscimg.vercel.app/

Switching to TinyPNG every time I needed to optimize images kept breaking my flow, so I built a VS Code extension that compresses images directly from the Explorer.

### AgentReady.dev

- Role: Web app
- URL: https://www.agentready.dev/

This started as an internal tool I wrote while wiring up markdown routing on getdbt.com. It solved enough real workflow pain that I turned it into a free public tool.

### Fair Rates Hyde Park

- Role: Local utility
- URL: https://hpelectric.info/

After a book keeping error raised local electric rates by ~38%, residents were left with long, hard-to-read utility PDFs. I built this site as a clear source of truth, plus steps rate payers can take to mitigate the impact, and used Claude to automate updates when new PDFs are published.

### diither

- Role: custom tool
- URL: https://diither.vercel.app/

Our design team did not have a reliable way to create scalable, dithered patterns. I built this tool so they can quickly generate custom SVG patterns and drop them directly into production work.

### Array2Csv

- Role: Custom tool
- URL: https://array-2-csv.vercel.app/

I built this utility to quickly turn arrays of objects into clean CSV files, with control over which keys become headers before download.

### Rock Yoga

- Role: Web design and development
- URL: https://www.rockyoga.studio/

This project started as a need for a calm, trustworthy online home for a yoga instructor. I designed and built the site with Sanity CMS for flexible updates and Momo Yoga for scheduling and bookings.

## Notes

### From Annoyance to Marketplace in a Weekend

Published: 2026-06-07
URL: https://johnrock.me/notes/annoyance-to-marketplace

A weekend pairing session with Claude turned a recurring annoyance into a published extension.

Before this weekend I had no idea what went into shipping, let alone building, a VS Code extension.

I paired with Claude on a problem I kept hitting: round-tripping through TinyPNG to optimize images exported from Figma or sent over by a stakeholder. I wanted to stay in Cursor and handle it from there. A right-click on the image, or on a whole directory, was the shape I wanted.

A few pairing sessions later, I had exactly what I needed, and it is now [live on the official VS Code marketplace](https://vscimg.vercel.app/).

It's a lot easier than it sounds.

### No Tutorial For This

Published: 2026-06-04
URL: https://johnrock.me/notes/no-tutorial-for-this

Four years at a startup, and the parts that actually taught me anything weren't the parts I could have studied for.

I joined a hypergrowth startup during COVID thinking I had a pretty good idea of what was ahead.

I didn't.

The tools changed. Priorities changed mid-sprint. People I worked with one quarter weren't there the next. Most of the real problems didn't have an obvious answer, and the ones that did usually weren't the ones worth solving.

You can't really study for that. You do the work, get some of it wrong, and show up the next day a little sharper than you were.

That's mostly been the job.