Kenneth Kalmer
Head Of Web Engineering at Ably Realtime
England, United Kingdom
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolKenneth Kalmer is a senior software leader and Head of Web Engineering based in London with nearly two decades building web platforms, infrastructure and engineering teams. A recipient of the UK Exceptional Talent in Digital Technology visa, he combines deep hands-on expertise in Clojure/ClojureScript, Ruby/Rails and modern AWS-driven operations with a track record of shipping reliable production systems. He’s founded and scaled products (ValuationUp) and consultancies, and currently leads web engineering at Ably while running Imilingo for contract engagements. An active open-source contributor, his Ruby gem contributions have over a million downloads and his nouislider Ember addon exceeds 260k downloads, reflecting impact beyond individual employers. Kenn mentors founders and developers, speaks at conferences, and blends pragmatic automation with cost-aware cloud architecture—like building development-hour-only testing and spot/auto-scaled AWS pipelines. He’s especially strong at turning complex data ingestion and processing problems into maintainable systems and teams.
17 years of coding experience
17 years of employment as a software developer
Business & Information Management, Business & Information Management at Tshwane University of Technology
English, Afrikaans
Stackoverflow
341reputation
5kreached
12answers
0questions
Github Skills (27)
ruby-rails10
javascript10
fonts10
prawn10
rspec10
audit10
pdf10
rails10
ruby10
font-face10
praw10
activerecord10
auditing10
react10
clojurescript10
Programming languages (15)
Github contributions (5)
collectiveidea/audited
Jan 2009 - Apr 2015
Audited (formerly acts_as_audited) is an ORM extension that logs all changes to your Rails models.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:106 commits, 10 PRs, 10 pushes in 6 years 3 months
Contributions summary:Kenneth primarily focused on enhancing the core functionality of the auditing system. Their contributions involved the addition of features such as tracking associated objects, adding comment functionality, and addressing issues related to potential memory leaks. Furthermore, the user refactored the codebase to improve its overall performance and maintainability. The user's work demonstrates a strong understanding of the existing auditing framework.
ruby-on-railsacts-asauditrailsorm-extension
prawnpdf/prawn
Jul 2012 - Oct 2013
Fast, Nimble PDF Writer for Ruby
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:26 commits in 1 year 3 months
Contributions summary:Kenneth focused on enhancing the `prawnpdf/prawn` library by implementing features related to font handling. Their contributions include accepting `Pathname` objects for font files, implementing `hash` and `eql?` methods for font objects, and optimizing code by removing duplicate methods. They also addressed issues related to string width calculations and font metrics caching.
pdf-generatorpdfnimblepdfkitprawn
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.