Bèr Kessels
Chief Technology Officer at Pathfounder
Arnhem-Nijmegen Region Netherlands
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolBèr Kessels is a pragmatic CTO and longtime web engineer with 12 years of professional experience and two decades of hands-on work in Drupal and Ruby on Rails. He currently leads Pathfounder, building an AI-powered virtual sales executive, while running his freelance web development practice berk.es and serving as secretary for a Dutch broodfonds. Founder of multiple startups, he blends entrepreneurial product instincts with backend craftsmanship—evident in contributions to the popular Spree e-commerce platform where he improved data integrity and slug-history behavior. Comfortable across infrastructure, API-first e-commerce, and decentralized social networking, he prefers shipping dependable systems over flashy prototypes. Based in the Arnhem-Nijmegen region, he bills himself “living in the future, building what’s missing,” reflecting a focus on pragmatic innovation and long-term maintainability.
12 years of coding experience
20 years of employment as a software developer
Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences
English, German, Dutch
Stackoverflow
27,285reputation
2.0mreached
327answers
277questions
ruby
top-5%
ruby-on-rails
top-5%
php
top-5%
http
top-1%
logging
top-1%
drupal
top-1%
Github Skills (22)
drupal10
ruby-rails10
ecommerce10
testing10
http10
rails10
ruby10
rest10
logging10
spree10
ruby-on-rails10
spreed10
json9
database-design9
php9
Programming languages (21)
Github contributions (5)
spree/spree
Apr 2014 - Mar 2016
Open Source eCommerce Platform for B2B, Marketplace, and Enterprise. REST API, TypeScript SDK, and production-ready Next.js storefront. Self-host it. Own your stack. No vendor lock-in. Zero platform fees.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:13 commits, 9 PRs, 8 comments in 1 year 11 months
Contributions summary:Bèr contributed to the Spree e-commerce platform by primarily focusing on improving code quality, addressing bug fixes, and enhancing functionality. They implemented validations for meta fields to match database constraints, fixed a line-item description issue, and removed boilerplate code. Furthermore, they added friendly_id history slugs to taxons and performed testing by specing slug-history behaviors.
ecommercenextjsrestrest-apitypescript
berkes/chef-repo
Jan 2015 - Feb 2018
Contributions:19 pushes, 6 branches in 3 years 1 month
ruby-on-railshostrailsrubyset-up
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