David King
Software Engineer at Reddit, Inc.
San Francisco, California, United States
Summary
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RockstarDavid King is a seasoned software engineer with 18 years of experience building scalable back-end systems, currently applying his expertise at Reddit in San Francisco. He has a long history with Reddit’s codebase—contributing historical core improvements such as search optimizations, caching, database call reductions, and features that affected comment and content behavior across the platform. Earlier work includes multithreading and GIL-release improvements to pylibmc, adding CAS support and better compression handling, reflecting deep systems and Python performance skills. Having worked across startups and large products (Hipmunk, Xythos), he combines pragmatic engineering with a focus on reliability and measurable performance gains. A detail that stands out: he pairs product-facing feature work with low-level performance fixes, showing comfort shifting between high-impact UX changes and concurrency/database optimization.
17 years of coding experience
10 years of employment as a software developer
Github Skills (13)
c1710
caching10
c1110
reddit10
python10
multithreading10
libmemcached10
database-optimization9
apidoc9
cas9
api9
zlib8
javascript4
Programming languages (7)
Github contributions (5)
reddit-archive/reddit
Jun 2008 - Mar 2016
historical code from reddit.com
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:130 commits, 2 pushes in 7 years 9 months
Contributions summary:David primarily focused on back-end improvements to the Reddit codebase. Their contributions included optimizing search functionality by implementing caching mechanisms and chunking data retrieval. Additionally, they addressed bugs and added new features, such as allowing comments on restricted subreddits and integrating new functionalities like random article listings. The user also made code improvements by optimizing database calls and made significant improvements related to core functionality.
pythonprawjavascripthistoricalarchiver
lericson/pylibmc
Mar 2010 - Apr 2013
A Python wrapper around the libmemcached interface from TangentOrg.
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:17 commits in 3 years 1 month
Contributions summary:David primarily focused on improving the `pylibmc` library's performance and functionality, particularly in relation to multithreading. They implemented changes to allow the GIL to be released during blocking calls, especially in `get_multi` operations. The user also added features like CAS (Compare-And-Swap) support and implemented improvements to compression-related functionalities.
python-wrapperpythonpython3libmemcached
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