Justin Keyes
Senior Software Engineer at Amazon Web Services (AWS)
Berlin, Germany
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top School
Top expert inNeovim and Vim Ecosystem Development
Justin Keyes is a Senior Software Engineer and long-time open-source maintainer based in Berlin with 13 years of experience building developer tools and cloud-integrated products. As lead maintainer of Neovim and a senior engineer/tech lead at AWS, he blends deep editor internals knowledge with product delivery—owning AWS Extensions for VS Code and contributing to high-impact projects like neovim/neovim and nvim-lspconfig. He has a track record of clean refactors, cross-platform fixes, and UX-minded plugin work, from core diagnostic subsystems to VSCode integration quirks and macOS GUI polish. Justin excels at modernizing legacy codebases and CI/tooling to boost release velocity, and his contributions reveal a preference for reducing noise and improving maintainability rather than piling on features.
13 years of coding experience
12 years of employment as a software developer
BSCpE Computer Engineering, BSCpE Computer Engineering at University of South Florida
Stackoverflow
6,844reputation
888kreached
90answers
7questions
vim
top-5%
logging
top-5%
patch
top-5%
tmux
top-5%
Github Skills (56)
git10
objective-c10
debug10
javascript10
python10
viml10
vimscript10
plugin-development10
typescript10
navigationbar10
user-interface10
language-server-protocol10
vscode-extension10
vim-plugin10
navigation-drawer10
Programming languages (34)
Github contributions (5)
justinmk/vim-dirvish
Jan 2015 - Jul 2022
Directory viewer for Vim :zap:
Role in this project:
Full-stack Developer
Full-stack DeveloperContributions:1 release, 13 reviews, 259 commits in 7 years 7 months
Contributions summary:Justin appears to have been primarily focused on refactoring and cleaning up the Vim plugin's codebase. Their contributions involved removing legacy key mappings, misfeatures (including clipboard and file operation features), and noise. The user also renamed internal elements such as 'messenger' to 'notifier', and 'b:filebeagle_directory_viewer' to 'b:dirvish'. Their work indicates a focus on improving the plugin's structure, maintainability, and user experience by streamlining the feature set.
vimdirectory-browservim-pluginstatuslineplugin
neovim/neovim
Aug 2014 - Jan 2023
Vim-fork focused on extensibility and usability
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:5 releases, 5422 reviews, 3601 commits in 8 years 6 months
Contributions summary:Justin contributed to refactoring the diagnostic system by moving files from `vim.lsp.diagnostic` to `vim.diagnostic`, refactoring client IDs to diagnostic namespaces, and updating the documentation and function signatures. These changes involved generalizing the diagnostic subsystem beyond the scope of LSP, replacing "client ids" with standard API namespaces generated from `nvim_create_namespace`. The user also fixed issues related to the Windows platform.
usabilityapiluavimvim-plugin
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