Application & systems development
End-to-end feature work across the stack — JavaScript/TypeScript and Node.js on top, C and C++ underneath. Cross-platform desktop apps, native libraries, and the glue in between.
Mnemosaic LLC · New Orleans, LA
Software consulting & contracting for teams that need it done right.
Mnemosaic LLC is the independent software practice of Charles Kerr, a software engineer and technical leader with more than 20 years building high-performance software — everything from web apps and native Linux, macOS, and Windows applications down to low-level C, C++, and Objective-C++ systems code, and everything in between. Available now for remote consulting and contract engagements.
- 20+ yrsProfessional software engineering
- 8+ yrsFully remote, distributed teams
- Open sourceElectron, Transmission, Pan & more
What I do
Consulting & contract engineering
Mnemosaic takes on the work that needs an experienced hand: shipping features, untangling hard bugs, and raising the quality bar on codebases that have to last. Engagements are remote-first and can be scoped as a focused project, an ongoing retainer, or embedded work alongside your existing team.
Cross-platform & desktop (Electron, Qt, GTK)
Deep experience with Electron, Chromium, Qt, and GTK+ — including upstream contributions to those projects. A good fit when your desktop app has to behave correctly on Linux, macOS, and Windows alike.
Performance & reliability
Profiling and fixing the bottlenecks that matter. I have a track record of shipping software that runs lean on constrained hardware — routers, Raspberry Pis, and metered cloud instances.
Testing & code quality
Test-driven development, integration harnesses, and reusable mocks. I bring hard-to-test, inherited codebases under test and keep them shippable through continuous integration.
Open source & release engineering
Maintaining projects, running release trains, triaging and delegating bugs, and handling security incidents responsibly for downstream users.
Technical leadership & mentoring
Architecture and design review, project planning, and growing engineers through constructive code review and clear priorities. Comfortable coordinating designers, QA, and developers toward a shipping date.
About
An experienced engineer, one point of contact.
Mnemosaic LLC is a Louisiana software company owned and operated by Charles Kerr. When you work with Mnemosaic you work directly with a principal engineer — no hand-offs, no bait-and-switch staffing.
Charles designs and develops testable code, works closely with stakeholders, and leads projects to completion. His career spans severe-weather data visualization at the University of Oklahoma's National Severe Storms Lab, air-traffic-control training systems under contract to the FAA, cloud backup and platform services at Canonical, and managing GitHub's Electron team. Along the way he has led popular open source projects including Transmission, Pan, and Electron.
The practice is remote-first and based in New Orleans, LA, working with clients wherever they are.
Get in touchSelected experience
Two decades of shipping software
A brief tour of the work behind Mnemosaic. The full detail lives in the résumé (PDF).
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2020–Present
Senior Software Engineer — Microsoft
Maintain the Electron shell that Visual Studio Code is built on, and contribute support and performance improvements to Electron's Chromium and V8 C++ internals. Maintain the Linux builds across both X11 and Wayland, and the macOS builds using Objective-C++ and AppKit.
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2019
Manager, Software Engineering — GitHub
Managed GitHub's Electron team, growing engineers' careers while continuing to ship as an individual contributor.
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2017–2019
Senior Software Engineer — GitHub
Led the release process for Electron 2 and 3, maintained code from the JavaScript API down through Chromium and Node.js C++ internals, and handled security incidents for downstream applications.
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2011–2017
Senior Software Engineer — Canonical
Architect and developer on Ubuntu's cloud backup tool and pay service, and lead of the User Services / Indicators project across desktop and phone.
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2007–2012
Project Lead — Transmission
Led a popular open source networking app: an efficient backend, a documented JSON-RPC API that spawned dozens of third-party apps, and the web and Qt clients.
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1999–2011
Senior Software Engineer — NSSL, University of Oklahoma
Co-wrote WDSS-II, a large-scale severe-weather data visualization tool, and OPUP, a radar visualization system delivered to the US Air Force.
Core technologies
- C++
- C
- JavaScript
- TypeScript
- Python
- Node.js
- Electron
- Qt
- GTK+
- Linux
- REST
- Git & GitHub
- CMake
- Test-Driven Development
- Continuous Integration
Contact
Let's talk about your project.
Whether you have a defined project or just a hard problem you'd like a second opinion on, I'd be glad to hear from you. The fastest way to reach Mnemosaic is email.