Braden Kelley - Freelance Software Engineer at Toptal

Braden Kelley

Freelance Software Engineer at Toptal

United States

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Summary

👤

Senior

🎓

Top School

Braden Kelley is a freelance full-stack software engineer with 13 years of experience and a decade focused on web technologies, currently favoring React, Node, and TypeScript. He combines deep JavaScript expertise with practical experience in Python, Perl, and a broad data stack (Postgres, MongoDB, Redis) to ship maintainable, test-driven solutions for clients via Toptal. Braden has contributed to notable open-source projects—improving vim/neovim tooling (ale) and enhancing react-mapbox-gl—demonstrating care for developer experience and mapping UX edge cases. He pairs modern toolchains like Docker and GraphQL with old-school editor loyalty (Vim), reflecting a pragmatic, productivity-first approach. With a CS degree from Oregon State and history building CI/CD pipelines and automated deployments at Rentrak, he’s comfortable moving systems from prototype to production. He also speaks multiple languages and brings a curiosity-driven habit of learning new tech and refining tooling beyond visible product features.

13 years of coding experience

5 years of employment as a software developer

Bachelor of Science, Computer Science, Bachelor of Science, Computer Science at Oregon State University

English, Italian, French, Spanish

Stackoverflow

Stats

4,717reputation

1.1mreached

94answers

16questions

Badges

create-react-app

top-5%

css

top-5%

javascript

top-5%

Github Skills (28)

javascript10

mapbox-gl-js10

mapbox-gl10

language-server-protocol10

vim-plugin10

neovim10

vim10

linter10

maps10

react10

jes9

typescript9

css9

typescript-types9

jtest9

Programming languages (18)

CSSC++RustCHandlebarsGoHTMLTypeScript

Github contributions (5)

dense-analysis/ale

Jun 2017 - Mar 2025

Check syntax in Vim/Neovim asynchronously and fix files, with Language Server Protocol (LSP) support

Role in this project:

Back-end Developer

Contributions:1 review, 7 PRs, 22 comments in 7 years 10 months

Contributions summary:Braden primarily worked on integrating and enhancing the "biome" linter/formatter within the "ale" Vim/Neovim plugin. Their contributions include fixing issues related to how biome handles files and stdin, enabling the execution of all enabled biome fixers, and ensuring the correct language is sent to the LSP proxy. They also implemented support for JSON and JSONC file types, improving the plugin's versatility. Moreover, the user refactored the code to allow passing options and configure the project root to Biome's LSP proxy.

lintervimcheckerneovimautocomplete

alex3165/react-mapbox-gl

Nov 2017 - Feb 2018

A React binding of mapbox-gl-js

Role in this project:

Front-end Developer

Contributions:8 commits, 8 PRs, 52 comments in 2 months

Contributions summary:Braden primarily focused on improving the `react-mapbox-gl` library by addressing several bugs and enhancing functionality. They fixed issues related to event handling within the `Source` component, ensuring proper loading behavior. The user also updated the `Layer` component, specifically modifying the zoom range logic, and improved the `ZoomControl` component by resolving a mouseout hover issue. These changes suggest a focus on improving the components and improving the usability of the library.

reactreact-mapbox-glmapboxmapbox-glmap

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