Kelly Mears

I didn't start with software. I started with sound.

My undergrad thesis at Bard College explored Japanese soundscapes — how ambient noise shapes place and meaning in a culture that listens differently. I didn't know it at the time, but that was the work that trained me to think in systems.

I grew up in West Virginia. The web pulled me in because it was the most open infrastructure I'd ever encountered — anyone could build on it, and the building mattered. Before writing code professionally, I spent time organizing, which shaped how I think about tools and who they're for.

I spent years at Other98 building the tech infrastructure for national grassroots campaigns — Standing Rock, Fight for $15, work where downtime had real consequences. From there I started Tiny Pixel Collective, a consulting studio for progressive organizations. I built platforms for NDN Collective, Twin Cities Tenants Union, and dozens of advocacy orgs, always working on the same problem: how do you make good tools for people who are too busy changing the world to fight with their CMS?

That question led me to open source. I became a lead developer in the Roots WordPress ecosystem, where my main project was bud.js — the build system powering Sage and the broader Roots toolchain. Over four years: 30+ packages, 854+ pull requests, tooling used across thousands of WordPress projects. bud.js is in maintenance mode now, but the ecosystem keeps going.

These days I'm a Senior Engineer at Carrot, building the web platform behind their real estate SaaS. I still maintain open source projects and I've gotten interested in what AI tooling actually changes about how we write code day to day.

When I'm not at a keyboard, my wife and I are cycling around Winston-Salem, NC, or being supervised by our cat. The cat has strong opinions about everything, especially food, and is not shy about sharing them.