**** KEVIN HARDER ****
READY.

PERSONAL

Howdy. I'm Kevin. I'm a father, husband, a software engineer & geek. I'm originally from Florida and have been living in Austin, Texas, since 2010. I'm also:

  • someone who loves to learn about everything and is inquisitive about the universe
  • a space and science buff
  • a fan of BBQ, good beer, Gators, and pumpkins
  • a collector of vintage computers and devices that have nostalgic apeal to me

I have a personal web site that I sometimes maintain at KevinHarder.com, and in the past have blogged there. You can find me on the major centralized social networks such as LinkedIn and Twitter.

I am interested in federated decentralized social and content networks, exploring how to evolve the internet from islands of content and gated social sites to something better. In that effort, I created an Austin community Mastodon server at AustinTexas.social to start microblogging with ActivityPub in the fediverse. Follow me at @kevin@austintexas.social.

My wife and I run a community puzzle exchange in Austin at AustinPuzzles.com. I am using the Harder.DEV brand for consulting and open source development.


PROFESSIONAL

I am a hands-on technical leader who loves to solve difficult problems, grow and mentor engineers, and learn new things. I have built and led a wide variety of software projects in multiple industries. You can view my full professional experience on my LinkedIn profile.

I am currently an engineering architect at Instructure, the makers of Canvas LMS, and manage a team of very talented architects and principal engineers that work across the organization. Previously, I was an engineering manager at Block (f.k.a. Square) on the Orders team, and at Indeed.com building products that helped people get jobs.

Prior to that, I spent five years building the modern SaaS e-commerce platform Kibo Commerce from scratch, which was formerly known as Mozu. Before that I worked at Dell where I built a new search platform for Dell.com, and at Telligent where I developed enterprise social collaboration software such as Community Server and Graffiti CMS.