Craig Ayre

Technical Lead on HubSpot’s web team, building HubSpot on HubSpot and improving the way we build with it.

GitHub LinkedIn

  1. 🏅 Q3 Smooth Operator

    Boston

    Recognised for reducing engineering friction across Digital Experience through developer tooling and AI workflows. The nomination said I find a better way to work, then actively bring the rest of the team along with me. At UNBOUND in Boston, I met HubSpot leaders, customers and partners.

  2. Fall 2026 Spotlight

  3. Contributed clearer regex checks to HubL

    Checking whether a value matched a pattern meant turning a replacement filter into a boolean: 

    {% if var and var|regex_replace('^foobarbaz$', '') == '' %}

    Now those checks can say what they mean:

    {% if var|regex_match('^foobarbaz$') %}
{% if var is search '[0-9]+' %}
{{ items|selectattr('name', 'search', '^foo') }}

  4. Spring 2026 Spotlight

  5. 🐝 Ally Pally

    Alexandra Palace, London

    Went as a bee to the World Darts Championship and got picked for the crowd challenge. £60,000 for a nine-darter, but Luke Woodhouse misses the D12.

  6. Fall 2025 Spotlight

  7. ⚽ Sunderland AFC are Premier League 🔴⚪

    Wembley Stadium

    Celebrated with 35,000+ other Mackems. Maybe VAR isn't so bad after all.

  8. Joined HubSpot

    Joined HubSpot as a Technical Lead on the Web team, building HubSpot on HubSpot.

  9. 🎯 First 180

    Three darts landed tightly together in the treble-20 ring of a Winmau dartboard, scoring 180.

  10. 🎤 Automating Continuous Improvement

    Talked about codemods and custom linting, using tooling to make continuous improvement less reliant on good intentions.

    Craig stands beside a projector screen showing the opening slide for Automating Continuous Improvement, with a laptop and projector set up in front of him at a pub venue.

  11. Ran Softwayre

    Ran an independent software consultancy, taking loosely defined problems through to shipped products for clients across sport, retail, automotive and healthcare. Grew the team and worked with clients including UEFA, IKEA, ZeroLight and AstraZeneca.

  12. 🎤 The Future of JavaScript

    Talked about where JavaScript was heading and how TC39 evolves the language. Still looking forward to the pipeline operator and pattern matching.

    Craig gives a talk beside a projected slide titled Optional chaining, Stage 1, showing a JavaScript code example at JavaScript North East.

  13. Scott Logic

    Senior consultant building and improving large financial applications, from customer-facing features to deeper platform and codebase work.

  14. Built a Pokémon Emerald bot

    Used screenshot and pixel analysis rather than reading game memory through Lua. A small state machine tracked what was happening on screen, with a lot of optimisation to keep the logic fast and tests to prevent regressions. It could work towards objectives like catching a specific Pokémon or hunting for shinies.

  15. ⌨️ Switched to Dvorak

    ASDFG AOEUI

    Switched to Dvorak and stuck with it. Started with Programmer Dvorak, but eventually settled on the standard layout.

  16. Ran an IRC bot on Freenode

    #html#css!docs

    Ran in the #html and #css channels on Freenode, answering common documentation queries. IRC bots are one of my favourite ways to learn a language: get one working, then find the most ergonomic syntax and syntactic sugar.