Kevin Burns is a founder and seasoned software leader with 17 years building scalable web and distributed systems from startups to large media platforms. Based in Palo Alto, he blends hands-on engineering (Go, Ruby, PHP, serverless architectures) with people leadership, having managed multiple teams and shipped high-throughput APIs and subscription systems at scale. He has deep experience in platform and operations work—designing a horizontally distributed Go-based bot runtime, operating thousands of sandboxed V8 isolates, and owning incident and release processes. An active open-source contributor, Kevin has improved documentation for the high-performance Dragonboat Raft library and strengthened test suites for mustache.php, showing attention to clarity and reliability beyond code. Former roles span engineering manager, tech lead, application architect and contractor, demonstrating an ability to move between strategy, architecture and hands-on implementation. He brings an architect’s sensibility—rooted in craftsmanship and lasting design—to building products people can rely on for years.
17 years of coding experience
15 years of employment as a software developer
Menlo Atherton High School
Cañada College
La Entrada Middle School
Multimedia Arts, Multimedia Arts at Santa Barbara City College
A feature complete and high performance multi-group Raft library in Go.
Role in this project:
Technical Writer
Contributions:7 reviews, 5 commits, 6 PRs in 2 years 5 months
Contributions summary:Kevin's contributions primarily focus on enhancing the documentation of the `dragonboat` library. They corrected typos, grammatical errors, and fixed references to non-existent methods. Additionally, they clarified the purpose and behavior of specific configurations, such as `OrderedConfigChange`, improving the clarity and usability of the documentation. This suggests a focus on making the library easier to understand and use for other developers.
Contributions summary:Kevin primarily focused on improving the test suite for the PHP Mustache implementation. Their contributions include adding new tests for delimiter switching, sections, and sticky delimiters, as well as fixing existing tests. These changes directly address the quality and reliability of the Mustache template engine by identifying and correcting bugs and edge cases.
phpmustache
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