Tim Abbott
Founder And CEO at Kandra Labs, Inc. (creators of Zulip)
San Francisco, California, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolTim Abbott is a seasoned software leader and founder with 25 years of experience, currently Founder and CEO of Kandra Labs (creators of the open-source team chat Zulip) and an active angel investor in San Francisco. He has a track record of rapid, high-impact engineering—at Dropbox he led a one-week migration from Mercurial to Git and slashed build times and flakiness across a massive Python codebase. Prior to that he co-founded Ksplice, whose live kernel-patching tech updated over 100,000 production servers and was acquired by Oracle. A hands-on engineer, he remains a lead Zulip developer and contributes across backend, desktop, mobile, Python API and typeshed stubs, showing rare fluency from kernel modules to typed Python libraries. MIT-trained, he combines product-minded execution with open-source stewardship and a focus on developer productivity at scale.
25 years of coding experience
8 years of employment as a software developer
Massachusetts Institute of TechnologyHigh School, High School at Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology
Github Skills (69)
documentations10
mobile-development10
postgresql10
python10
c1110
c1710
javas10
rest-api10
typescipt10
django210
typescrpt10
javascript10
django10
stubs10
linux-kernel10
Programming languages (19)
Github contributions (5)
zulip/python-zulip-api
Aug 2012 - Nov 2022
Python library for the Zulip API.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:66 reviews, 543 commits, 262 PRs in 10 years 4 months
Contributions summary:Tim contributed to the development of the Zulip API, focusing on adding and refactoring API functionality for sending and receiving messages. Their work involved modifying the core `common.py` and `zephyr_mirror.py` files to handle options, message formats, and API calls. The user also worked on refactoring API handling and moving to the API subdirectory, indicating a focus on improving the API's structure and functionality.
python-libraryapipythonpypizulip
zulip/zulip
Aug 2012 - Jan 2023
Zulip server and web application. Open-source team chat that helps teams stay productive and focused.
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:82 releases, 13759 reviews, 10118 commits in 10 years 6 months
Contributions summary:Tim's commits primarily focus on extracting, refactoring, and refactoring parts of the analytics views codebase in the Zulip server, indicating a back-end development role. Their work involves extracting code into new files, implementing a new user settings endpoint, and migrating database structures for message editing and custom emoji. The user has improved various features of the Zulip server and added new functionalities and indexes to improve performance.
pythonweb-applicationcollaborationzulipjavascript
Find and Hire Top DevelopersWe’ve analyzed the programming source code of over 60 million software developers on GitHub and scored them by 50,000 skills. Sign-up on Prog,AI to search for software developers.