Henry Kirkness is a founder-CTO and hands-on engineering leader with 11 years of experience building and scaling product-first teams from London. As CTO of Planes he splits time between coding, DevOps problem-solving and coaching developers through pair programming and one-to-ones, helping agencies and startups ship fast. He cut his teeth launching React Native apps early at Rota and later led hiring and architecture for SaaS migrations, demonstrating a pragmatic blend of front-end expertise and cloud-native operations. Henry contributes to open-source projects around React and Next.js deployment, improving responsive SSR testing and Lambda@Edge compatibility for real-world apps. He has a track record of turning tricky engineering challenges—like GPS-based ad-tracking and incremental static regeneration—into production tools that teams use daily. Outside work he brings an experimental, builder mindset to improving developer efficiency and AWS tooling.
11 years of coding experience
3 years of employment as a software developer
Gordonstoun
Computer Science Artificial Intelligence Object Orientated Programming Network Systems, Computer Science Artificial Intelligence Object Orientated Programming Network Systems at University of the West of England
⚡ Deploy your Next.js apps on AWS Lambda@Edge via Serverless Components
Role in this project:
Full-stack Developer
Contributions:33 reviews, 12 commits, 9 PRs in 5 months
Contributions summary:Henry primarily focused on enhancing the functionality and stability of the Next.js application deployed on AWS Lambda@Edge. Contributions include implementing and refining rewrite behaviors for compatibility with the Next.js server, as well as adding and modifying CDK constructs. These changes involved updating existing functionalities and introducing improvements for incremental static regeneration. Additionally, the user worked on the CDK construct, including providing access to underlying resources.
An SSR compatible approach to CSS media query based responsive layouts for React.
Role in this project:
Front-end Developer
Contributions:4 reviews, 6 commits, 1 PR in 6 days
Contributions summary:Henry primarily focused on testing and refining the functionality of the `fresnel` library, specifically related to its responsive layout capabilities using CSS media queries. They implemented tests to verify the expected behavior of nested `Media` components and ensure correct rendering in various scenarios, including those using `greaterThan`, `lessThan`, and `between` props. The contributions also included correcting test names and removing unnecessary elements to improve test clarity.
querymatchmediareactlayoutsapproach
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