Dave Cowden
Chief Technology Officer at CoLinx IT
Greenville, South Carolina, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolDave Cowden is a seasoned technology leader and current CTO with over two decades of engineering and management experience and 11 years in senior development leadership roles. He has repeatedly transformed e-commerce and logistics platforms—driving deployment frequency from quarterly to daily, boosting availability, and leading migrations from on‑prem to AWS and Kubernetes. Hands-on at heart, Dave contributes to security-focused open source projects like smallstep (enhancing SSH and ACME features) and founded the CadQuery CAD project, which has thousands of stars and advances programmatic 3D modeling. His background blends mechanical engineering (MS and BE from Georgia Tech, both 4.0) with deep software and automation expertise, from robotics programming to enterprise Java systems still running in production. Based in Greenville, SC, he combines a pragmatic, security-first engineering approach with operational discipline and a quiet fondness for tea.
11 years of coding experience
18 years of employment as a software developer
MS, mechanical engineering, 4.0, MS, mechanical engineering, 4.0 at Georgia Institute of Technology
Stackoverflow
7,835reputation
778kreached
157answers
32questions
android
top-5%
java
top-5%
multithreading
top-5%
Github Skills (25)
acme10
security10
certificate10
go10
x50910
cryptography10
oauth10
ssh10
java9
apidoc9
multithreading9
aws9
android9
certificate-authority9
api9
Programming languages (18)
Github contributions (5)
smallstep/certificates
Apr 2020 - Aug 2020
🛡️ A private certificate authority (X.509 & SSH) & ACME server for secure automated certificate management, so you can use TLS everywhere & SSO for SSH.
Role in this project:
Back-end & Security Engineer
Back-end & Security EngineerContributions:7 reviews, 43 commits, 14 PRs in 4 months
Contributions summary:Dave primarily contributed to the back-end functionality of the `certificates` repository. They implemented changes to the SSH API, focusing on tag-based host management and improving flexibility, as well as enhancing the ACME server with error handling and documentation updates, specifically regarding key-change routes. Additionally, the user integrated and tested AWS KMS functionality and made code adjustments related to the metadata service versions. These contributions demonstrate a focus on security and certificate management.
sshacme-serversecurecertificate-authoritysecurity-tools
smallstep/cli
Jan 2020 - Apr 2020
🧰 A zero trust swiss army knife for working with X509, OAuth, JWT, OATH OTP, etc.
Role in this project:Security Engineer
Security EngineerContributions:3 reviews, 17 commits, 20 PRs in 2 months
Contributions summary:Dave primarily contributed to enhancing the security features of the `smallstep/cli` repository. Their work involved adding options for configuring terminal redirects in OAuth flows and introducing new functionalities for secure SSH host certificate generation. Key contributions include implementing host ID generation, integrating machine ID-based host identification, and refactoring error reporting. Furthermore, the user refactored parts of the code to use more secure blake2b hashing.
yubikeysignsshzero-trustsecurity-tools
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