David McDonald
Senior Software Engineer at Volexity
New Orleans, Louisiana, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolDavid McDonald is a Staff Software Engineer specializing in DFIR research and tool development with seven years of experience building forensic software and contributing to open-source projects. Based in New Orleans and pursuing an MS in Computer Science, he blends practical incident-response skills with rigorous R&D from roles at Cellebrite and Volexity, where he progressed from engineer to staff. A CTF enthusiast and reverse-engineering practitioner, he has improved real-world tooling—such as contributing Apple plist and bookmark decoders and recursion guards to the popular fq project for binary format analysis. He values collaborative knowledge growth and mentorship, bringing both hands-on debugging chops and a research mindset to tough forensic challenges.
7 years of coding experience
4 years of employment as a software developer
Master of Science - MS, Computer Science, Master of Science - MS, Computer Science at University of New Orleans
Github Skills (5)
json10
go10
jq8
xml8
golang8
Programming languages (11)
Github contributions (5)
wader/fq
Oct 2022 - Dec 2022
jq for binary formats - tool, language and decoders for working with binary and text formats
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:41 reviews, 75 commits, 6 PRs in 2 months
Contributions summary:David primarily contributed to the `format/bplist` directory, modifying code related to binary plist file decoding. Their work involved adding and removing type casts and fixing reference calculations within the decoding logic. Furthermore, the user added checks for recursion to prevent infinite loops, and refactored the type-checking for dictionary keys. They also added a decoder for the apple bookmark format.
queryyamlc99xmllanguage-tool
dgmcdona/volatility3
Dec 2023 - Dec 2024
Volatility 3.0 development
Contributions:96 pushes, 27 branches in 1 year
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.