Kurtis Kemple
Sr. Director Of Developer Relations
United States
Summary
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RockstarKurtis Kemple is a Sr. Director of Developer Relations with 12 years of experience helping teams and companies create better developer experiences, currently leading DevRel at Slack. A former incarcerated engineer turned tech leader, he blends empathy-driven community building with hands-on engineering across front-end and full-stack projects. He’s contributed to high-profile open-source work—improving React Native components and making UX fixes in the Gatsby framework—demonstrating attention to performance and developer tooling. Kurtis has led DevRel and developer experience teams at Apollo, AWS, and Gatsby, translating community feedback into product and engineering changes. As a founder and technical lead he’s built production apps, developer-facing platforms, and AI-assisted learning tools, showing a strong mix of execution and strategy. He’s known for reducing friction in developer workflows and a pragmatic approach to shipping improvements that scale.
12 years of coding experience
9 years of employment as a software developer
Github Skills (23)
javascript10
react-native10
calendars10
ui-components10
flatlist10
webpack10
webpacker10
react10
gatsby10
static-site-generator9
animation9
user-interface9
eslint9
graphql8
gesture-recognition8
Programming languages (9)
Github contributions (5)
kkemple/react-native-sideswipe
Feb 2018 - Jan 2021
Simple React Native carousel with sensible defaults
Role in this project:
Front-end Developer
Front-end DeveloperContributions:60 commits, 33 PRs, 55 pushes in 3 years
Contributions summary:Kurtis primarily focused on enhancing the `react-native-sideswipe` component, refactoring existing code and implementing new features. Their work included cleaning up React API usage, improving animation renders, and preventing unneeded re-renders. The user also addressed velocity handling and scroll performance. Moreover, they added support for `onEndReached` functionality and incorporated features to pass gesture events.
reactreact-native-carouselsensiblereact-nativecarousel
gatsbyjs/gatsby
Apr 2018 - Oct 2018
The best React-based framework with performance, scalability and security built in.
Role in this project:Full-stack Developer
Full-stack DeveloperContributions:33 commits, 34 PRs, 39 pushes in 6 months
Contributions summary:Kurtis contributed to the Gatsby framework by fixing banner positioning on the website and adding an ESLint loader to the webpack configuration. They also worked on consistently using createNodeId in gatsby-source-contentful and disabling Gatsby ESLint if a local configuration is found. Furthermore, the user updated the site showcase with deep linking for filters and added active state to the top navigation, improving user experience.
gatsbyreactweb-appfastestcompiler
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