Mark Mcdowall
Staff Software Engineer at Plex, Inc.
Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolMark Mcdowall is a Staff Software Engineer with 15 years of experience, currently at Plex and based in Port Coquitlam, BC. He is an active open-source contributor across the popular "arr" ecosystem (Sonarr, Radarr, Readarr, Lidarr, Prowlarr) and Plex Media Player, working in both backend and full-stack capacities. His contributions focus on robust download-client integration, Newznab indexer presets, edge-case episode parsing, and system stability—down to HTTPS/certificate fixes and build process improvements. A former co‑founder with DevOps and networking roots and formal training from BCIT, he pairs entrepreneurial pragmatism with deep operational know-how to ship resilient media-server features at scale.
15 years of coding experience
10 years of employment as a software developer
British Columbia Institute of Technology (BCIT)
Github Skills (57)
api-doc10
javascript10
back-end-development10
web-client10
net10
dotnet10
javascripts10
api10
front-end-development10
indexer10
aspnet10
dotnet-core10
back-end10
webclient10
backend10
Programming languages (13)
Github contributions (5)
Sonarr/Sonarr
Sep 2010 - Jan 2023
Smart PVR for newsgroup and bittorrent users.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:1 release, 1467 reviews, 5737 commits in 12 years 5 months
Contributions summary:Mark's contributions focused on improving the backend functionality of the application. They implemented fixes for core features related to managing episodes, including ensuring the correct series is used for manual file imports and addressing issues with handling episode file deletion. The commits demonstrate involvement with parsing episode titles and handling various aspects of series management, indicating work within the core logic of the application. The user's code changes involved fixing edge cases in the software.
bittorrentpvr
plexinc/plex-media-player
Feb 2017 - Dec 2019
Next generation Plex Desktop/Embedded Client
Role in this project:Full-stack Developer
Full-stack DeveloperContributions:151 commits, 2 PRs, 124 pushes in 2 years 9 months
Contributions summary:Mark primarily focused on updating and maintaining the web client components within the Plex Media Player project. This involved bumping versions of web client dependencies and updating related configurations. Additionally, the user made changes to the versioning of the player itself, and adjusted URL encoding within the code. They also reverted a change related to seek support, likely due to issues encountered with Live TV functionality.
next-generationelectronplexdesktopembedded
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