Jessica McKellar
Quick Facts
Biography
Jessica Tess McKellar is an American software developer, engineering manager, and author.
Education
McKellar attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technologyand studied computer science and chemistry.
Early life
McKellar was born in the San Francisco Bay Area in 1987 to parents Jane and Joel McKellar. She has a younger brother named Max and a younger sister named Olivia.
Work
McKellar was an early employee and engineering manager at Ksplice, which was acquired by Oracle in 2011. In 2012, McKellar co-founded Zulip, a chat software company. In 2014, the company was acquired by Dropbox. She has spoken at several conferences about outreach efforts to increase the diversity of open-source communities.
Since 2012, she has been a director of the Python Software Foundation. In 2013, McKellar won the O'Reilly Open Source Award for her contributions to Python. In2016, McKellar won the Women in Open Source Community Award, awarded by Red Hat. She is a contributor to Twisted, a networking framework for Python. From 2014 to 2017, she was a Director of Engineering and the chief of staff to the VP of Engineering at Dropbox.
Jessica was a Senior Technical Advisor on HBO show Silicon Valley.
As of January 2017, McKellar is the Founder and CTO of Pilot.com, Inc., a bookkeeping service, targeted towards startups, technology companies, and nonprofits.
Author
McKellar is the co-author of the book Twisted Network Programming Essentials, 2nd Edition (O'Reilly Media - 2013).