David Turner
Indie Game Developer at Self-employed
New York, New York, United States
Summary
🤩
RockstarDavid Turner is an indie game developer and veteran software engineer with 11 years of professional experience and a long history of systems and tooling work dating back to the Free Software Foundation. He built popular puzzle games like Semantle and Surfwords while also contributing substantial C and test automation fixes to core Git libraries (libgit2 and nodegit), demonstrating deep familiarity with version-control internals. His industry background spans companies from Twitter—where he helped speed up Git and migrate repositories to a monorepo—to Two Sigma and Oxhead Alpha, blending low-level systems, developer tools, and product-focused engineering. Comfortable shipping both consumer-facing games and critical backend fixes, he pairs curiosity-driven side projects with rigorous QA and test automation skills. Based in New York, he brings a pragmatic balance of open-source stewardship, security-minded engineering from earlier FSF work, and a knack for turning algorithmic puzzles into engaging player experiences.
11 years of coding experience
20 years of employment as a software developer
Stackoverflow
1,122reputation
122kreached
32answers
2questions
Github Skills (23)
git10
javascript10
libgit210
testing10
c1110
c1710
libgit2sharp10
version-control10
nodejs10
data-structure9
algorithm9
algorithms9
git-submodules9
data-structures9
shell8
Programming languages (21)
Github contributions (5)
libgit2/libgit2
Jul 2016 - Dec 2017
A cross-platform, linkable library implementation of Git that you can use in your application.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer & Test Automation Engineer
Back-end Developer & Test Automation EngineerContributions:8 commits, 12 PRs, 51 comments in 1 year 4 months
Contributions summary:David primarily contributed to bug fixes and improvements within the `libgit2` library, focusing on core functionalities related to remotes, rebasing, and submodules. The contributions involved modifying C code and test files, demonstrating a focus on ensuring correct behavior and handling edge cases within the Git library's internal logic. Their work included addressing issues with detached HEAD states during rebasing and fixing a stash save bug related to the index.
version-controlgit-clientlibgit2dvcscross-platform
nodegit/nodegit
Jul 2016 - Mar 2017
Native Node bindings to Git.
Role in this project:QA Engineer / Test Automation Engineer
QA Engineer / Test Automation EngineerContributions:5 commits, 5 PRs, 15 comments in 7 months
Contributions summary:David primarily contributed to the testing of the `nodegit/nodegit` repository. The commits focused on adding new test cases, specifically for tree entries and submodules. Several commits fixed existing tests, such as the "is a directory" test, and updated documentation. The user also added tests for new functionalities like the `isSubmodule()` method and `entryByName` function.
electronwindowsjavascriptlibgit2c-plus-plus
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.