David Kowis
Senior Staff Engineer at Kohl's
Grapevine, Texas, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolDavid Kowis is a Senior Staff Engineer with 21 years of hands-on experience building high-performance, scalable software across the full stack, from embedded C on early Apple II systems to modern Java, Kotlin, and Rust services. He has led teams and driven architecture and operational improvements at enterprises like Kohl's, CoreLogic, The Home Depot, Southwest Airlines, and Rackspace, often championing developer productivity, CI/CD, and cost-saving migrations to modern frameworks. A pragmatic engineer and mentor, he pairs Extreme Programming and pair programming discipline with system-level curiosity that spans networking, cloud platforms, and SRE practices. An active open-source contributor, his work includes meaningful backend and automation improvements to widely used projects such as Cucumber and Betamax and refactors that improved maintainability in Java libraries. He values technically empowering teams—time to learn, freedom to choose the right tools, and solving challenging, meaningful problems. Based in Grapevine, Texas, he maintains a personal forge of experiments and side projects that reflect a lifelong habit of tinkering and continuous learning.
21 years of coding experience
23 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelors, Computer Science, Bachelors, Computer Science at Park University
Stackoverflow
5,036reputation
296kreached
33answers
14questions
github
top-5%
activerecord
top-5%
ruby-on-rails
top-5%
Github Skills (30)
cli10
slack-api10
back-end-development10
groovy10
cucumber10
apache-http-client10
cucumber-jvm10
java10
ruby10
javas10
spock10
jruby10
test-automation10
dsl9
http-proxy9
Programming languages (33)
Github contributions (5)
cucumber/cucumber-jvm
Jan 2012 - May 2016
Cucumber for the JVM
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer & Test Automation Engineer
Back-end Developer & Test Automation EngineerContributions:57 commits, 27 PRs, 22 pushes in 4 years 5 months
Contributions summary:David's primary contributions focused on enhancing the Cucumber-JVM project by implementing new features for calling step definitions from other steps. They introduced the `pending` DSL, enabling the definition of pending steps, and added support for pending steps without a reason. The user also refactored code to change the execution method to include Reporter and Locale and made several changes to improve the project's internal workings. This included adjusting how the World object was passed, and refining the internal mechanics of step definition execution.
cucumberjvmcucumber-jvmjavapolyglot-release
Itiviti/simple-slack-api
May 2017 - Jun 2017
(simple) Java Slack client library
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:11 commits, 1 PR, 5 comments in 9 days
Contributions summary:David primarily focused on refactoring and enhancing the Java-based Slack client library. Their contributions included grouping user change events, adjusting event handling logic, and updating data classes with Lombok annotations for brevity. They also worked on grouping replies for better code organization. Overall, the user's changes improved the library's structure and maintainability.
javaslack
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