Brent Kelly is a seasoned technical director and founder with over two decades building New Zealand’s largest SME-focused digital transformation agency, Zeald, and guiding more than 15,000 businesses through rapid online evolution. He combines deep hands-on software design and front-end development experience with commercial leadership across sales, marketing, and high-performance team management. Brent remains technically active—contributing front-end enhancements and DOM-event features to notable open-source projects like gmail.js and formBuilder—demonstrating practical UI and integration expertise. As an owner, investor and advisor he applies digital strategy across diverse sectors from telecoms and hosting to agriculture and marine, often driving radical as well as incremental growth. He also runs Olcra to steward a portfolio of investments and serves as Technical Director for GEM, reflecting a rare mix of operator, investor and technologist. Based in Auckland with a Bachelor’s in Information Sciences, he’s known for pragmatic, resilient leadership shaped by growing a business from a small-town startup into an industry leader.
11 years of coding experience
17 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor’s Degree, Information Sciences, Bachelor’s Degree, Information Sciences at Massey University
Contributions:30 commits, 2 PRs, 20 comments in 1 year 10 months
Contributions summary:Brent primarily focused on developing features for the Gmail JavaScript API, particularly related to DOM manipulation and event handling within the Gmail interface. Their work involved adding DOM observers to detect specific events such as when a new email is loaded, recipients are added, or when a reply/forward is initiated. They also refactored the codebase to improve efficiency and added the ability to register custom observers.
Contributions:15 commits, 12 PRs, 26 comments in 1 month
Contributions summary:Brent primarily focused on enhancing the user experience and functionality of the form builder. Their contributions include refactoring the codebase, implementing new features such as double-click editing, and integrating external tools like TinyMCE and Fine Uploader for rich text editing and file uploads, respectively. They also addressed several bugs, improved the rendering of the forms, and streamlined the user interface. These changes improved the overall usability of the form builder project.
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