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. That training in pattern recognition and systems thinking turned out to be exactly the foundation I needed for everything that came after.

I grew up in West Virginia, and the web pulled me in because it was the most democratic infrastructure I'd ever encountered. Before writing code professionally, I spent time organizing — work that shaped how I think about the relationship between tools and power. I landed in the nonprofit and advocacy space, spending years at Other98 building the digital backbone for national grassroots campaigns — from Standing Rock to Fight for $15. That work taught me that technology isn't neutral: the tools you build and who you build them for are deeply political choices.

From there I founded Tiny Pixel Collective, a consulting studio focused on progressive organizations. I built platforms for groups like NDN Collective, the Twin Cities Tenants Union, and dozens of advocacy orgs, always with the same question in mind: how do you make powerful tools accessible to 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 within the Roots WordPress ecosystem, where my main project was bud.js — the official build system powering Sage and the broader Roots toolchain. Over four years I shipped 30+ packages, wrote 854+ pull requests, and built tooling used across thousands of WordPress projects. The project earned an Arctic Code Vault contribution badge. bud.js is now in maintenance mode, but the Roots ecosystem continues to thrive.

These days I'm a Senior Engineer at Carrot, building scalable web applications for a SaaS platform powering lead generation and marketing tools for real estate professionals. I still maintain open source work, still think a lot about developer experience, and I've gotten very interested in how AI is changing the way we write and think about code.

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.

Currently excited about

• AI-augmented development workflows and what they mean for tooling design
• Design systems that bridge the gap between developer ergonomics and brand expression
• The intersection of static analysis, build tooling, and editor intelligence