Justin Ferrell

I'm a web and mobile developer with over 15 years of experience building performant and secure systems for the web and mobile.

A lot of my recent work has been exploring around the relationship between web development and advanced digital marketing analytics, as well as performance optimization and optimization for artificial intelligence.

My wife and I maintain two apps for Apple devices that we think are great.

In April of 2026, my wife and I worked with the parents of our son's kidney donor, Emily, to launch The Emily Matejovitz Foundation and its annual scholarship in her memory. 

I live and work in West Virginia with my wife and my son.

A row of classic hot rods with their hoods popped at a car show

Replacing Raycast with Spotlight and Shortcuts

In keeping with my ongoing (and maybe misguided) mission to use more of the default Apple apps on all of my devices, I recently decided to kick the tires on the new version of Spotlight that shipped in macOS Tahoe last Fall. I switched from…

The Emily Matejovitz Foundation

Having a toddler who is waiting for a kidney transplant is strange. Setting aside the nightly dialysis, you just spend a lot of time getting prepared and just kind of staying that way. You just stay prepared, indefinitely. By the time Emily gave Ripley his…

A Bicycle for Your Bicycle

TLDR: In an effort to replicate the functionality of the badass new Pebble ring, I built a shortcut for capturing voice notes and sending them to the Notes app with relevant metadata, and then used Notes to sort them into a kind of "inbox" using…

The Ferrell Family Holiday Spectacular

Isn't music just the best? Holiday music specifically is very tough to beat. For busy parents, the act of turning on Christmas music almost feels like a cheat code for a little passive holiday magic between the big events like putting up the tree and…

Never give up hope, no matter how dark things seem.

A More Civilized API

TDLR: I built an API that returns quotes from Star Wars: The Clone Wars as either JSON or RSS. You can find it at wisdom.ferrell.rocks. Despite my best efforts, I love a good holiday programming project. Mastowatch, arguably the biggest solo development undertaking of my…