Udit Desai
Principal Software Engineer at Nine
Sydney, New South Wales, Australia
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolUdit Desai is a Principal Software Engineer based in Sydney with 13 years of experience building and architecting scalable web platforms, particularly for major newsrooms powering Sydney Morning Herald, The Age and Australian Financial Review. He combines hands-on front-end expertise—evidenced by contributions to WordPress’s widely used Gutenberg editor—with systems and observability leadership from senior roles at Nine. Comfortable across the stack, Udit has delivered headless CMS and Next.js integrations for global clients, led cross-continental teams, and driven DevOps and delivery improvements. He brings academic grounding from Santa Clara University and a track record of translating newsroom needs into robust, user-focused tooling, often improving UX details that quietly lift product quality.
13 years of coding experience
11 years of employment as a software developer
Master of Science (MS) Computer Science, Master of Science (MS) Computer Science at Santa Clara UniversityBachelor of Science (BS) Computer Science, Bachelor of Science (BS) Computer Science at Savitribai Phule Pune UniversityMaster of Science (MS) Information Technology, Master of Science (MS) Information Technology at Dhirubhai Ambani Institute of Information and Communication Technology
English, Gujarati, Hindi, Marathi
Stackoverflow
221reputation
23kreached
4answers
1question
Github Skills (16)
wordpress10
javascript10
gutenberg10
react10
user-interface9
tooltip8
tooltips8
css7
html7
asp-net-mvc6
tinymce6
font-awesome6
android6
jekyll6
jquery6
Programming languages (16)
Github contributions (5)
WordPress/gutenberg
Aug 2019 - Oct 2021
The Block Editor project for WordPress and beyond. Plugin is available from the official repository.
Role in this project:
Front-end Developer
Front-end DeveloperContributions:11 reviews, 23 commits, 23 PRs in 2 years 2 months
Contributions summary:Udit primarily contributed to the front-end components of the Gutenberg editor. Their work included adding functionality to the `MediaPlaceholder` component, fixing block controls for the List Block, and refactoring the Embed Edit component from a class to a function component. Furthermore, the user improved the UI by making the tooltip delay configurable and removing an extra comma character. These changes focused on enhancing user experience and improving the editor's functionality.
wordpressgutenbergwordpress-plugin
desaiuditd/wp-skeleton
Oct 2019 - Mar 2026
A skeleton repo as a starter for WordPress websites using Bedrock. https://roots.io/bedrock/. Local Development via Lando. https://lando.dev/
Contributions:98 PRs, 145 pushes, 13 branches in 6 years 6 months
wordpressbedrockbedrock-wordpress-installationdockerdocker-compose
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