Keanan Koppenhaver

Developer advocate and technical generalist


Profile

A developer advocate and generalist with over 8 years of experience turning business ideas into products, continuously bridging the gaps between the technical and the and other teams involved in every project. I pride myself on my ability to both work with engineering teams as well as be more outward facing and connect with potential customers and partners. I’m seeking a role where I can use my interests in speaking, writing and creating interactive demos to help a technical tool reach more developers.

Experience

Developer Advocate, Airplane; Remote — Mar 2023 - Dec 2023

- Owned the content strategy for the Airplane blog, creating ~25 pieces of original technical and tutorial content

- Supported the migration and integration of ~200 acquired content pieces from the ContainIQ blog

- Produced video demos and was the technical advisor on written content for Airplane's first-ever launch week

Writer, Draft.dev; Remote — 2020 - 2023

- Completed over sixty 1500-word technical written pieces for clients across a variety of topics such as engineering management, DevOps and specific technical implementations.

- Asynchronously worked with editors to capture the voice of the client and emphasize key points prior to publishing

Writing Samples:

- Why Python 2 Will Never Die

- The Case for Granular Permissions

- Chef vs. Docker for Builds and Deployments

- Incident Management Best Practices

- How to select and highlight text in rich text editors

Co-Founder and CTO, Alpha Particle; Chicago, IL — 2017 - 2023

- Expanded the business from its inception to nearly $500k in yearly revenue

- Managed, mentored, and continuously grew a dev team comprised of both full time hires and contractors to deliver client work

- Directed and completed projects for a diverse stable of clients, from large publishing clients such as RollingStone.com and Variety.com to a horse veterinarian in New Mexico looking to revitalize his online business

Lead Developer, How-To Geek; Remote — 2017 - 2018

- Modernized development processes by introducing a QA environment, pull request-based workflow, and standardized infrastructure with Ansible

- Refactored technical debt to achieve sub-second page loads across the site on 20-30 million page views per month

- Built an entirely new WordPress theme from the ground up and led development for new brand reviewgeek.com

- Facilitated all the necessary background work to lay a proper foundation for the migration of the entire infrastructure to AWS, as well as initiating its transfer

Technical Architect, doejo; Chicago, IL — 2016 – 2017

- Advised development teams on multiple projects across the entire agency on technical strategy and execution based on individual clients' needs

- Worked directly with the sales team to align sales goals, targets, and language with realistic capabilities of the agency’s technical team

- Frequently attended industry conferences to form agency-level partnerships and present our work more broadly

- Mentored junior developers and upskilled dev teams

Developer, doejo; Chicago, IL — 2013 - 2016

Specific projects include: Investors.com

- Migrated ~100k pieces of content from a legacy .NET CMS onto WordPress

- Oversaw a launch that resulted in 25% faster site response, 15% increase in traffic and DevOps improvements that facilitated smoother deploys

- Managed a mix of local and remote developers across DevOps, front end, and backend teams

ScreenerTV.com

- Led the development team that upgraded the branding and relaunched Tribune Media’s TV news site

- Worked with the WordPress.com VIP and Tribune Media teams to scale the new site to nearly 100k daily page views

Other Experience

Speaking

- Frequent public speaker, both personally and professionally, since 2016

- Full breakdown available at https://www.keanankoppenhaver.com/talks/.

Business acquisitions — 2021 - Present

Kanban for WordPress:

- Led the acquisition process for our team of three business partners, including myself. Handled negotiations, diligence and all other relevant aspects of the deal.

- Detailed deal breakdown: https://www.keanankoppenhaver.com/msm-1/

WP Pusher and Branch CI:

- Being an independent acquisition, I handled all aspects from sourcing to raising capital ($150k+) to corporate structure and due diligence

- Detailed deal breakdown: https://www.keanankoppenhaver.com/msm-8-deal-breakdown-wp-pusher-and-branch/

Education

Illinois Wesleyan University, Bloomington, IL — Economics Major, Computer Science Minor, 2014

Skills

HTML/CSS/JS, WordPress, PHP, Public Speaking, Project Management, Technical Sales, Technical Writing