Ralf Kistner
Co-Founder And CTO at JourneyApps
Western Cape, South Africa
Summary
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RockstarRalf Kistner is a seasoned co-founder and CTO with 16 years of hands-on software engineering and product leadership based in the Western Cape, South Africa. He has led JourneyApps since 2009, combining entrepreneurial drive with deep technical craftsmanship across full-stack development and platform evolution. Ralf contributes to open-source projects—helping refactor and modularize Android libraries like the popular zxing-android-embedded—demonstrating attention to maintainability and developer ergonomics. He blends long-term ownership of a startup codebase with practical improvements such as API targeting, dependency management, and UI cleanup that keep products extensible and robust. Quietly, his work shows a preference for pragmatic refactors that remove cruft and enable reuse, helping teams ship faster while preserving quality.
16 years of coding experience
Github Skills (8)
bar-code10
javas10
barcode-scanner10
android-development10
java10
lib9
api8
api-design8
Programming languages (17)
Github contributions (5)
journeyapps/zxing-android-embedded
Nov 2012 - Oct 2022
Barcode scanner library for Android, based on the ZXing decoder
Role in this project:
Full-stack Developer
Full-stack DeveloperContributions:6 releases, 2 reviews, 425 commits in 10 years
Contributions summary:Ralf contributed to the refactoring of the codebase to prepare for use as a library project. This included adding pom.xml and Readme.md files, modifying switch statements, and changing the target Android API level. The user also made several changes to core files, adjusting menu options, adding an about dialog, and replacing said dialog with the original help screens from the ZXing library. The user also removed unused code and assets from the project and integrated the IntentIntegrator library.
scannerpdf417barcode-scannerscanner-libraryandroid-library
journeyapps/domparser.js
Sep 2013 - Sep 2020
DOMParser for XML with line and column info
Contributions:4 reviews, 40 commits, 10 PRs in 7 years 1 month
browserxmljavascriptdomdomparser
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