Alex Kirk
Senior Software Engineer Team Lead at Automattic
Vienna, Austria
Summary
🤩
RockstarAlex Kirk is a Senior Software Engineer and Team Lead based in Vienna with 16 years of experience building and shipping web-scale products. At Automattic he blends hands-on front-end and back-end work with leadership, contributing notably to high-profile open-source projects like WordPress.com Calypso and Jetpack. His expertise centers on internationalization and localization—adding new language support, refining translation strings, and ensuring correct locale handling across UI, CLI, and REST APIs. Alex is comfortable navigating both UX-facing JavaScript and backend integration challenges, improving code quality while keeping global users in mind. Colleagues rely on him to translate complex internationalization requirements into robust, production-ready solutions that scale across millions of sites.
15 years of coding experience
Stackoverflow
6,817reputation
531kreached
138answers
10questions
php
top-5%
javascript
top-5%
Github Skills (26)
javascript10
rails-i18n10
translation10
plugin-development10
wordpress10
internationalization10
php10
localization10
ember-i18n10
i18n-js10
react10
redux9
s69
nodejs9
gettext9
Programming languages (18)
Github contributions (5)
Automattic/wp-calypso
Nov 2015 - Apr 2021
The JavaScript and API powered WordPress.com
Role in this project:
Front-end Developer
Front-end DeveloperContributions:27 reviews, 156 commits, 209 PRs in 5 years 5 months
Contributions summary:Alex primarily contributed to the localization and internationalization efforts within the WordPress.com Calypso project. Their work included adding support for new languages (Saraiki), updating language settings, and making UI elements translatable. The user also focused on ensuring proper URL localization and updating various components, such as the theme showcase and help/support sections, to align with translated content and the updated WordPress.com URL structure. Additionally, the user addressed code quality issues and made improvements to the editor and date/time format settings.
apireactwordpressjavascriptes6
Automattic/jetpack
Sep 2015 - Jan 2021
Security, performance, marketing, and design tools — Jetpack is made by WordPress experts to make WP sites safer and faster, and help you grow your traffic.
Role in this project:Back-end Developer & Localization Specialist
Back-end Developer & Localization SpecialistContributions:34 commits, 28 PRs, 37 pushes in 5 years 5 months
Contributions summary:Alex primarily focused on improving the internationalization and localization aspects of the Jetpack plugin. They updated translatable strings in the CLI, removed URLs from translatable strings, and corrected typos. They also addressed issues related to the WordPress.com locale and translation file retrieval, ensuring correct language settings for comments and REST API post slug generation. Additionally, the user contributed to the Nova module and sitemap generation, refining translation strings and improving the overall internationalization capabilities.
reactexpertswordpressphpsecurity
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