Colin Kennedy - Staff Engineer at Xero

Colin Kennedy

Staff Engineer at Xero

Old Toronto, Ontario, Canada

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Summary

👤

Senior

🎓

Top School

Colin Kennedy is a Staff Engineer with 15 years of experience building full-stack Java and JavaScript systems, currently driving engineering efforts at Xero from Old Toronto. He progressed from senior developer roles into engineering management before returning to a senior individual-contributor role, blending hands-on coding with team leadership and delivery ownership. Colin contributes to open-source tooling—improving a Node.js Google Maps client and extending a compact QR encoder with ANSI/ANSI256 image outputs—demonstrating attention to API usability and low-level output flexibility. His background spans web operations, systems consulting, and enterprise product work, giving him a pragmatic approach to reliability and developer experience. He holds a BS in Business Administration with a computer science focus and brings a penchant for practical optimizations that improve stability and user-facing error handling.

15 years of coding experience

12 years of employment as a software developer

BS Business Administration Computer Science Information Technology, BS Business Administration Computer Science Information Technology at Naveen Jindal School of Management, UT Dallas

Certification Audio Engineering, Certification Audio Engineering at Collin College

Stackoverflow

Stats

1,114reputation

107kreached

21answers

7questions

Github Skills (22)

code-generator10

javascript10

apidoc10

c1110

codegen10

c1710

code-generation10

api10

nodejs10

google-maps-api10

qr-code10

image-processing9

command-line-interface8

byte6

php6

Programming languages (18)

C#PowerShellJavaC++RustCGoHTML

Github contributions (5)

moshen/node-googlemaps

Aug 2010 - Feb 2016

A simple way to query the Google Maps API from Node.js

Role in this project:

Back-end Developer

Contributions:71 commits, 5 PRs, 5 pushes in 5 years 7 months

Contributions summary:Colin primarily contributed to the `node-googlemaps` project by implementing and refining methods for interacting with the Google Maps API. Their work included fixing typos, refactoring code, adding testing with Vows, and updating the README. They also incorporated error handling within the callback functions and introduced features like support for encoding polylines. These changes indicate a focus on improving the library's functionality, stability, and user experience.

queryapigoogle-apigooglemapsgoogle-maps-api

fukuchi/libqrencode

Jan 2012 - Jan 2012

A fast and compact QR Code encoding library

Role in this project:

Back-end Developer

Contributions:9 commits in 3 days

Contributions summary:Colin primarily focused on enhancing the `libqrencode` library by adding new image types and associated functionalities. They implemented ANSI and ANSI256 image types, allowing for the generation of color-coded QR codes. Their work involved adding new options for image type selection, implementing functions to write ANSI-formatted output, and refactoring the code for improved maintainability and margin handling. The contributions extended the library's output options and flexibility.

encoding-libraryqrcodecompactencodingupc

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