Danny Cocks
Software Engineer at Agile Digital
Perth, Western Australia
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolDanny Cocks is a software engineer based in Perth with 15 years of experience building performance-sensitive front-end interfaces and robust backend systems. He has a strong open-source track record contributing UI performance and animation optimizations to high-profile GNOME projects (gnome-shell and dash-to-dock) and full-stack work on the ubports/unity8 environment. Danny blends academic rigor—a PhD in atomic/molecular physics and several research fellowships—with industry engineering, having built a multi-threaded, time-versioned in-memory database and cross-language bindings for ZefDB. He’s comfortable across the stack from UI animation micro-optimizations to designing synchronization and access systems for public servers, and has experience in cloud operations and algorithmic systems. Notably, his OSS contributions focus on perceptible user experience improvements (smoother animations, reduced relayouts) that often require deep understanding of rendering pipelines rather than just surface tweaks.
15 years of coding experience
6 years of employment as a software developer
Pimlico SHSDoctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.), Atomic/Molecular Physics, Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.), Atomic/Molecular Physics at James Cook University
English, German, Japanese
Github Skills (23)
uitest10
javascript10
qt10
animation10
gnome-shell10
linux10
optmization10
optimisation10
gnome10
performance-tuning10
qml10
clutter10
ui-testing10
optimization10
docking9
Programming languages (14)
Github contributions (5)
micheleg/dash-to-dock
Jan 2018 - Oct 2022
A dock for the Gnome Shell. This extension moves the dash out of the overview transforming it in a dock for an easier launching of applications and a faster switching between windows and desktops.
Role in this project:
Front-end Developer
Front-end DeveloperContributions:40 reviews, 27 commits, 57 PRs in 4 years 9 months
Contributions summary:Danny primarily contributed to the front-end aspects of the `dash-to-dock` extension, focusing on improving the dock's behavior and user experience within the Gnome Shell. Their work involved addressing issues related to animations, hover states, and menu interactions, ensuring a smoother and more responsive dock. They implemented fixes for bugs related to the dock's visibility and responsiveness during certain events, like screen lock/unlock and dash destruction. Additionally, the user introduced new signals and features, like the `menu-opened` signal, to enhance the dock's functionality.
gnome-shelldockgnomelinux
GNOME/gnome-shell
Apr 2018 - Aug 2022
Read-only mirror of https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-shell
Role in this project:Front-end Developer
Front-end DeveloperContributions:96 commits in 4 years 5 months
Contributions summary:Danny primarily contributed to the user interface of GNOME Shell. Their work involved optimizing the performance of animations and UI elements by refactoring code to use more efficient methods such as translation properties instead of position properties for animations. They addressed performance bottlenecks related to relayouts and redraws within the icon grid and overview, by implementing offscreen redirect, caching techniques and deferring operations, contributing to a smoother and more responsive user experience. Furthermore, they fixed bugs and improved the visual appearance of the interface, such as correcting blending issues and ensuring correct handling of the login screen logo.
gnomegnome-shell
Find and Hire Top DevelopersWe’ve analyzed the programming source code of over 60 million software developers on GitHub and scored them by 50,000 skills. Sign-up on Prog,AI to search for software developers.