Christopher Blum
VP Apps & Extensions at LanguageTool
Hamburg, Germany
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolChristopher Blum is a seasoned entrepreneurial technologist and product leader with 14 years of experience building web apps, extensions, and language tools from idea to market. As VP Apps & Extensions at QuillBot and co-founder/MD of LanguageTool, he blends hands-on engineering (JavaScript, Node.js, front-end) with product and marketing leadership, and has deep expertise in localization—evidenced by substantial German-language contributions to the widely used LanguageTool open-source project. He founded multiple startups including SpellBoy and Protonet and scaled developer-facing features while maintaining cross-browser compatibility and test suites for legacy libraries. A Y Combinator W16 alumnus based in Hamburg, he combines startup grit with a designer’s sensitivity to user-facing interfaces and linguistic detail.
14 years of coding experience
11 years of employment as a software developer
Y Combinator W16 Founder, Y Combinator W16 Founder at Y CombinatorCertified Communication Designer User Interface Engineering Communications Marketing Design, Certified Communication Designer User Interface Engineering Communications Marketing Design at Hanseatische Akademie für Marketing und Medien
Stackoverflow
1,085reputation
106kreached
2answers
0questions
javascript
top-5%
html
top-5%
file-upload
top-1%
Github Skills (17)
javascript10
jquery10
testing10
localization10
front-end-development10
spellchecking10
file-upload10
natural-language-processing10
plugin-development9
compatibility9
html9
javas8
text-processing8
java8
css7
Programming languages (12)
Github contributions (5)
languagetool-org/languagetool
Aug 2018 - Jan 2023
Style and Grammar Checker for 25+ Languages
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer & Localization Specialist
Back-end Developer & Localization SpecialistContributions:31 reviews, 6001 commits, 274 PRs in 4 years 5 months
Contributions summary:Christopher's contributions primarily focus on enhancing the German language support for the LanguageTool project. They added new case rule exceptions and expanded the existing ones to improve accuracy. They also incorporated spelling suggestions, focusing on common and frequently misspelled words in the German language. Their work demonstrates a strong focus on improving the project's language support capabilities.
style-checkergrammar-checkercheckergrammarlanguagetool
protonet/jquery.inview
Aug 2011 - Jul 2017
A jQuery plugin that adds a bindable 'inview' event for detecting when an element is scrolled into view.
Role in this project:Front-end Developer
Front-end DeveloperContributions:28 commits, 8 PRs, 17 pushes in 6 years
Contributions summary:Christopher primarily contributed to the testing and maintenance of the jQuery inview plugin. They updated the test suite to support different jQuery versions (1.8, 1.9, 1.12, and 2.2), demonstrating a focus on compatibility. The user also addressed browser-specific issues, such as handling "focus-scrolls" in older Internet Explorer versions and ensuring the plugin correctly handled elements with `display: none;`. Finally, they performed code refactoring and plugin release preparation, including bug fixes and minor improvements.
bindableinviewjqueryjavascriptdetecting
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