Jason Karns is a seasoned web developer and longtime contributor in the Ruby and JavaScript ecosystems, bringing 16 years of experience building standards-driven, accessible web applications from server to front end. Known at Test Double as a “Double Agent,” he blends backend Rails and Sinatra expertise with Node and rich-client frameworks like Backbone and Ember to deliver maintainable, well-tested systems. He has a strong testing and tooling focus—improving test runners, CI, and package formulas for high-impact OSS projects including Homebrew and Rails’ Active Support. Jason’s background spans enterprise and startup work (GitHub, Shutterstock, New Relic) and includes legacy-to-modern migrations and performance tuning, reflecting a pragmatic approach to technical debt. Based in Columbus, Ohio with a CS degree from Ohio State, he pairs deep hands-on skills (git, vim, REST, microformats, accessibility) with a knack for improving developer workflows and testability. An uncommonly practical open-source maintainer, he’s fixed build systems, test reporters, and package installs that many teams silently rely on.
16 years of coding experience
18 years of employment as a software developer
Graham High School
BS, Computer Science & Engineering, BS, Computer Science & Engineering at The Ohio State University
Contributions:7 releases, 239 commits, 133 PRs in 7 years 1 month
Contributions summary:Jason's contributions primarily revolve around enhancing the testing infrastructure and improving the build process of the nodenv project. Their work includes setting up and configuring testing environments using tools like Bash and Bats, and optimizing the Continuous Integration process on Travis CI. The user also focused on streamlining the build process through the introduction of a configure script, and improving the overall stability and efficiency of the testing framework. This involved code changes to testing helper files and completion scripts.
Lineman helps you build fat-client JavaScript apps. It produces happiness by building assets, mocking servers, running specs on every file change
Role in this project:
Full-stack Developer
Contributions:1 release, 75 commits, 10 pushes in 4 years 2 months
Contributions summary:Jason contributed to the LinemanJS project by improving the build process and test suite. They fixed banner issues for JavaScript concatenation and implemented the images and webfonts tasks using Grunt's copy functionality. Furthermore, the user refactored the task loading mechanism and updated dependencies, enhancing the overall maintainability and efficiency of the project.
javascript-clientfatjavascripthappinessspecs
Find and Hire Top DevelopersWe’ve analyzed the programming source code of over 60 million software developers on GitHub and scored them by 50,000 skills. Sign-up on Prog,AI to search for software developers.