Austin Keener
Senior Software Engineer
Summary
🤩
RockstarAustin Keener is a Senior Software Engineer with 14 years of experience, currently contributing to Discord's engineering efforts. He focuses on backend architecture and maintainability, demonstrated by major refactors to the popular JDA (Java Discord API) wrapper—introducing interfaces, removing leaky abstractions, adding debug modes, and improving event compression handling. Comfortable navigating large, community-driven codebases, he favors pragmatic internal redesigns that reduce accidental complexity and surface clearer APIs. He blends deep Java expertise with a contributor’s mindset, making production systems easier to understand and debug for teams and users alike.
14 years of coding experience
Github Skills (10)
javas10
refactoring10
java10
refactor10
api-design9
architecture9
exception-handling9
architectures9
performance-optimization8
javadoc8
Programming languages (11)
Github contributions (5)
discord-jda/JDA
Dec 2015 - Sep 2022
Java wrapper for the popular chat & VOIP service: Discord https://discord.com
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:29 releases, 623 reviews, 738 commits in 6 years 10 months
Contributions summary:Austin made significant contributions by refactoring code within the JDA project, changing its structure to use an interface. The user removed JDA#login(String, String) and several abstract classes that were incorrectly hiding internal processes. They also implemented a debug mode to print stack traces for exceptions and introduced a system for handling compressed READY events. These modifications demonstrate a focus on improving the internal architecture and maintainability of the project.
apiapi-wrapperdiscordpromoted-downloadsbot
DV8FromTheWorld/Yui
Nov 2015 - Aug 2021
Bot for the Gaming Bunch's Discord Server. Uses the JDA as the Discord Library.
Contributions:1 review, 225 commits, 20 PRs in 5 years 10 months
discord-jsdiscorddiscord-librarybotdiscord-bot
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