Me
Personal
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 on my stuff page). 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.
Professional
Advocating for schema-first API development, Protobuf, and ConnectRPC. Creating educational resources like protobuf.com (with in-browser WebAssembly Protobuf runtime), authoring technical articles on the Buf blog, and building open-source tooling across the Protobuf ecosystem.
Engineered high-throughput backend services and player data infrastructure for Subway Surfers. Built internal developer tools, evaluated API attack surfaces, developed proof-of-concept exploits to secure player systems, and championed cybersecurity practices.
Focused on distributed internal developer tools, test automation infrastructure, and system reliability across large-scale engineering operations.
Apple BadgeArchitected cloud object storage systems (OpenStack Swift), high-throughput network polling pipelines, and metrics infrastructure. Authored and maintained the official softlayer-python SDK/CLI and built swftp (an FTP/SFTP gateway for OpenStack Swift built with Twisted Python).
I previously worked for Apple, SoftLayer (before and after IBM), and SYBO. I currently work in Developer Relations for Buf Technologies, helping developers build schema-first APIs with Protobuf and ConnectRPC. If you want the full details of my career history, view my complete profile on LinkedIn .
I began my career pursuing "full stack" but now I am solidly a backend engineer. I have gravitated towards backend systems, distributed architectures, and specifically developer tooling. I've been the primary developer for several public-facing products and internal platforms. I've delved into data engineering—designing high-scale ETL pipelines, network pollers, and metric collection systems. Along the way, I've tracked down bugs and developed insights that directly led to saving and earning millions of dollars monthly.
I have also dipped my toes into cybersecurity by evaluating API attack surfaces, developing exploits and proof-of-concept demonstrations to highlight vulnerabilities. This directly led to remediating exploits, elevating organizational focus on security best practices, and helping establish dedicated security functions.
I have a deep curiosity for network protocols and dissecting how they work under the hood. I have dived deep into gRPC, ConnectRPC, Protobuf, OpenAPI, WebTransport, HTTP/2, HTTP/3, QUIC, BGP, gNMI, YANG, NETCONF, SNMP, and TL1—even maintaining forks of Go to support legacy network hardware and obscure TLS extensions. My current primary programming language is Go, but I work extensively with TypeScript, Rust, Python, WebAssembly, Elixir, Clojure, Java, and PHP.
Social
You can find me at the following places! Feel free to shoot me a message:
My online alias is sudorandom. The username "sudorandom" is, of course, a pun. It mixes "sudo" (which gives a single Linux command superuser privileges) with "pseudorandom" (things that seem unpredictable but are computer-generated, following strict rules).
Projects
The comprehensive list of all my software projects, interactive tools, and experiments (both ongoing and completed) lives on my stuff page.
Browse all projects and tools on /stuff/Support Me
Here is what I have available on displate.com. They sell metal posters that you can hang on your wall using magnets, which makes it easy to switch them out to keep your walls looking fresh. Consider buying one of mine for your home! Or at least using my affiliate link to order other posters from Displate: displate.com/?art=5dd499109f9ea
