Me

Hello! My name is Kevin McDonald. I am a software engineer living in Copenhagen.

Having grown up in Texas, mostly around the DFW area, I now find myself living in the beautiful city of Copenhagen, Denmark. In 2021, my wife and I decided to embark on this adventure to raise our daughter and embrace a new way of living. As a part of this new life, I've taken up cycling as my main mode of transportation (I don't even own a car!), and I'm even learning Danish. My daughter attends a Danish kindergarten and is growing up bilingual. At this point she identifies more as Danish than American. This journey has been difficult at times but it has also been incredibly rewarding.

Video games used to be a big part of how I spent my free time. I got really into Halo/Halo 2 in high school, World of Warcraft in college and Eve Online in my 20s (see the Evepraisal project below). Now-a-days I really only play casual games, usually roguelikes, but the interest is still there. I just don't have the time!

I read Sci-Fi and fantasy books, usually in audiobook form. I sometimes read non-fiction on topics like popular science and software engineering.

I previously worked for Apple and SoftLayer (before and after IBM). I currently work for SYBO. If you want the full details of my work history, see my profile on linkedin.

I began my career pursuing "full stack" but now I am solidly a backend engineer. I have gravitated more towards backend systems, and specifically internal tools. However, I have a wide variety of experiences. I have been the primary developer for several public-facing products. I have delved into data engineering with designing ETL pipelines, network pollers, and metric systems. I've developed insights that have made measurable impacts on product design and has directly led to saving and earning millions of dollars monthly. I have also dipped my toe into cybersecurity by looking at the attack surface of my current company's APIs and developed reasonable exploits and proof of concepts to demonstrate the need to focus on this topic more. This has directly lead to fixing those particular exploits, more attention to security best practices and was a piece of evidence for creating a real cybersecurity team at that company.

I tend to get interested in network protocols and dissecting how they work. I have dived deep into gRPC, SNMP, HTTP/2, gNMI, NETCONF and TL1. I don't see myself stopping any time soon with this. My current working programming language is Go, but I have previously worked with Elixir, Clojure, Python, Java, and PHP as my working programming language in the past.