Blake Jennelle
Growth Advisor & Leadership Coach at Kickoff
Asheville, North Carolina, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolBlake Jennelle is a growth advisor and leadership coach with 12 years of experience blending hands-on product and engineering insight with executive-level strategy. A longtime DuckDuckGo leader and early hire, he progressed from senior software engineer into VP/SVP growth roles and now continues to coach the company’s executives. He’s co-founded and led startups and served as CTO at a venture firm, partnering with founders across consumer, crypto, devtools, and fintech to scale teams and products. Blake contributes to well-known open-source DuckDuckGo projects, improving backend logic and user-facing instant answers such as character-counting and domain-info integrations. Based in Asheville, he combines investor-level perspective with practical engineering chops and a coaching style that treats clients as peers and thought partners. He’s notable for moving fluidly between building products, advising boards, and mentoring leaders to create sustainable momentum.
12 years of coding experience
16 years of employment as a software developer
B.A. Social Studies (Magna Cum Laude Phi Beta Kappa), B.A. Social Studies (Magna Cum Laude Phi Beta Kappa) at Harvard University
Github Skills (10)
apim10
duckduckgo10
javascript10
api10
perl10
instantsearch10
handlebars9
programming-language8
regular-expression8
testing7
Programming languages (3)
Github contributions (5)
duckduckgo/zeroclickinfo-spice
Jun 2014 - Aug 2016
DuckDuckGo Instant Answers based on JavaScript (JSON) APIs
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:58 commits, 3 PRs, 2 pushes in 2 years 2 months
Contributions summary:Blake primarily worked on implementing and modifying back-end logic for the domain information spice. Their contributions included creating API integrations, modifying the triggering logic for the spice, and updating the API calls to retrieve and display domain information. The user also refactored the JavaScript code and templates to utilize a new API and to display data in a more user-friendly manner. Furthermore, they improved the handling of errors and missing data within the spice.
javascriptinstant-answersperlduckduckgohandlebars-js
duckduckgo/zeroclickinfo-goodies
Jun 2014 - Jun 2014
DuckDuckGo Instant Answers based on Perl & JavaScript
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:7 commits, 2 comments, 1 issue in 2 days
Contributions summary:Blake primarily contributed to the `Chars` instant answer functionality, which is part of the DuckDuckGo Instant Answers system. Their work involved adding new triggers, refining the handling of input strings, and fixing edge cases to improve the accuracy and robustness of the character counting feature. They also added tests and improved code quality, making the code more maintainable. These contributions focused on improving the user experience related to character counting in DuckDuckGo.
javascriptperlinstant-answersduckduckgo
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