James Kiesel
Technical Lead at PaperKite
Wellington, Wellington, New Zealand
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolJames Kiesel is a Technical Lead based in Wellington, New Zealand, with 12 years of hands-on software engineering experience spanning backend, full-stack, and technical leadership roles. He has led engineering practices at companies like Flick Electric Co. and PaperKite and repeatedly returned to senior engineering roles at Optimal Workshop, demonstrating a mix of delivery and people-focused leadership. A prolific Ruby on Rails contributor, James has meaningful open-source work on notable projects such as Discourse and Loomio—implementing mailing-list features, backend event handling, and data export tooling that improved user privacy and email workflows. He pairs product-minded engineering with mentorship experience (Firehose, STEM-Away) and a background in theatre, which surfaces in his pragmatic, creative approach to problem-solving and communication. Known for cleaning up legacy code, shipping reliable APIs, and refining email UX, he excels at turning messy requirements into maintainable systems.
12 years of coding experience
11 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor of Science (B.S.), Computer Science / Theater, Bachelor of Science (B.S.), Computer Science / Theater at Skidmore College
Stackoverflow
341reputation
11kreached
3answers
7questions
Github Skills (36)
json10
ruby-rails10
javascript10
back-end-development10
rspec10
rails10
ruby10
e-mail10
email-templates10
discourse10
emailjs10
apidoc9
ember9
php9
api9
Programming languages (13)
Github contributions (5)
loomio/loomio
Feb 2014 - Sep 2019
Loomio is a collaborative decision making tool
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:20 releases, 2863 commits, 2132 PRs in 5 years 8 months
Contributions summary:James primarily contributed to the backend logic, as evidenced by the modifications to the `config/initializers/event_bus.rb` file, which manages event handling and email sending, the services and models related to discussion and motion, and the API endpoints. They implemented changes related to user deactivation, document management, and general code cleanup. Furthermore, the user was also responsible for adjusting and refactoring the email templates.
decision-makingcollaborativedecision
discourse/discourse
Nov 2014 - Aug 2018
A platform for community discussion. Free, open, simple.
Role in this project:Full-stack Developer
Full-stack DeveloperContributions:59 commits, 58 PRs, 78 comments in 3 years 9 months
Contributions summary:James primarily focused on implementing and refining features related to mailing list functionality within the Discourse platform. Their contributions spanned both frontend and backend, including modifying user preferences, estimating email frequency, and creating email templates. They also addressed bugs, improved code quality, and added features, such as allowing likes via email. Furthermore, the user worked on UI components, adding hooks for widgets.
discourserailsforumjavascriptruby
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