Bret Copeland
Principal Software Engineer at Microsoft
Portland, Maine, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolBret Copeland is a Principal Software Engineer with 13 years of experience building reliable, user-focused systems and leading teams from startups to Microsoft. He blends hands-on engineering—shipping backend fixes and features like bigint handling and experimental BULK INSERT support in the popular tedious Node TDS library—with strategic architecture work for space systems and ground software at York Space Systems. A pragmatic leader, Bret has led ad server teams at Stack Overflow, architected analytics and ad-selection systems, and transitioned teams and products on-time while mentoring engineers. He values the human side of software, prioritizing delighted users and empowered teams, and has delivered full-stack solutions from custom QUIC-based data links to React operational interfaces. Outside of work he’s a pilot and musician, signaling a penchant for technical precision paired with creative problem solving.
13 years of coding experience
16 years of employment as a software developer
University of Kansas
Stackoverflow
23,090reputation
1.4mreached
49answers
0questions
mongodb
top-5%
websocket
top-5%
npm
top-1%
Github Skills (23)
javascript10
npm10
back-end-development10
tds10
bigint10
pm210
nodejs10
coffeescript9
database-api9
socket-io9
websocket9
databases9
mochajs9
database9
mongodb9
Programming languages (7)
Github contributions (5)
tediousjs/tedious
Jul 2014 - Oct 2015
Node TDS module for connecting to SQL Server databases.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:78 commits, 4 PRs, 8 pushes in 1 year 3 months
Contributions summary:Bret primarily focused on fixing a bug related to writing `bigint` values and added corresponding tests to ensure the fix's correctness. They also introduced experimental support for `BULK INSERT` functionality within the `tediousjs/tedious` repository. Furthermore, the user made changes related to bulk loading and refactored the code for improved instantiation and error handling. The user implemented changes in the tracking buffer, connection, and data-type modules.
sqlserversql-servertdsjavascriptsql
Unitech/pm2
Nov 2013 - Nov 2013
Node.js Production Process Manager with a built-in Load Balancer.
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:5 commits in 1 day
Contributions summary:Bret primarily focused on modifying and refactoring core components of the PM2 process manager. They implemented a new method, `God.prepareJson`, for preparing applications, and refactored common utility functions. Further contributions included adding an optional `cwd` parameter to the `prepareJson` method and fixing error messages, which improved the usability and robustness of the application configuration. The user also changed the `CLI.js` and `God.js` files to utilize the new functions.
command-line-toolbalancernode-jsdeploynodejs
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