Hugh Kennedy
Staff Engineer at Canva
United Kingdom
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolHugh Kennedy is a Staff Engineer and creative JavaScript specialist with 14 years building frontend experiences and WebGL-driven visualisations. He has led technical teams at Canva and Flourish, combining hands-on shader and UI work with product-focused leadership. An active open-source contributor, Hugh has significantly improved glslify — adding inline shader support and post-transform capabilities — and enhanced popular tools like shader-school and disc to make graphics tooling more usable. His background in playable experience design and photography informs a strong visual sensibility that shows up in polished styleguides and data-visualisation UIs. Comfortable across full-stack and frontend domains, he pairs deep WebGL expertise with pragmatic engineering to reduce bundle bloat and improve developer ergonomics. Based in the UK, he blends creative craft with scalable frontend architecture to deliver engaging interactive products.
14 years of coding experience
14 years of employment as a software developer
Master of Arts - MA Playable Experience Design and Indie Games, Master of Arts - MA Playable Experience Design and Indie Games at Goldsmiths, University of LondonBachelor’s Degree Design in Photography and Situated Media, Bachelor’s Degree Design in Photography and Situated Media at University of Technology Sydney
English, German
Stackoverflow
3,942reputation
743kreached
7answers
1question
google-chrome-extension
top-1%
compression
top-5%
google-chrome
top-1%
jquery
top-5%
gzip
top-5%
javascript
top-5%
Github Skills (29)
javascript10
visualization10
shader10
css10
responsive-design10
glsl10
ui-design10
google-chrome-extension10
google-chrome10
front-end-development10
html10
browserify10
nodejs10
lessc10
d3js10
Programming languages (7)
Github contributions (5)
glslify/glslify
Feb 2014 - Oct 2018
:sparkles: A node.js-style module system for GLSL!
Role in this project:
Full-stack Developer
Full-stack DeveloperContributions:103 commits, 14 PRs, 50 pushes in 4 years 9 months
Contributions summary:Hugh primarily worked on improving the `glslify/glslify` project by refactoring the codebase to enhance its performance and usability. Their contributions include implementing features that allow inline shaders, and the re-exposing of glslify transform streams from browserify. They also fixed the handling of variable names and introduced support for post transforms, resulting in a more flexible and efficient shader processing tool.
module-systemwebglnode-jswebgl2raymarching
hughsk/disc
Jul 2013 - Apr 2015
:chart_with_upwards_trend: Visualise the module tree of browserify project bundles and track down bloat.
Role in this project:Front-end Developer
Front-end DeveloperContributions:70 commits, 1 PR, 2 pushes in 1 year 8 months
Contributions summary:Hugh primarily focused on enhancing the user interface and visual aspects of the project. Their contributions included implementing color schemes, adding visual elements and features. The user also refactored code and improved the overall presentation and usability of the visualization tool. They also worked on integrating and expanding available color palettes and UI components.
charttrendbrowserifybundlesvisualization
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