Don Gagne
Drone Coder at Home
Redmond, Washington, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolDon Gagne is a seasoned software engineer and former Microsoft engineering leader with 12 years focused on embedded and full-stack systems, now concentrating on drone software from Redmond, WA. He contributes to flagship open-source projects like PX4 Autopilot and QGroundControl, improving core state machines, FTP file handling, telemetry, camera tracking and video streaming. Don blends deep product-scale engineering experience—having led teams across Bing, Office and Microsoft's ad platform—with hands-on firmware and ground-station development. He pairs systems-level architecture skills with pragmatic bug fixes and unit tests that make complex flight software more robust. Known around the community as “Drone Coder,” he enjoys spending stretches writing code for UAV tooling and flight stacks when not doing leadership work. His background uniquely bridges enterprise-scale engineering processes and low-level embedded avionics.
12 years of coding experience
28 years of employment as a software developer
BS CS, BS CS at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
Github Skills (18)
c-language10
px410
autopilot10
qt10
gstreamer10
mavlink10
sys10
state-machine10
qml10
embedded10
cprogramming-language10
telemetry10
drones9
unit-testing9
user-interface9
Programming languages (9)
Github contributions (5)
mavlink/qgroundcontrol
Nov 2013 - Nov 2022
Cross-platform ground control station for drones (Android, iOS, Mac OS, Linux, Windows)
Role in this project:
Full-stack Developer
Full-stack DeveloperContributions:2 releases, 347 reviews, 7519 commits in 9 years 1 month
Contributions summary:Don's commits primarily focused on enhancing the ground control station for drones, specifically within the `mavlink/qgroundcontrol` repository. Their work involved significant code changes to the `Vehicle` and `Camera` modules, with a focus on improving functionality related to telemetry, command handling, and video streaming, as well as the addition of new camera tracking functionality. The user also made adjustments to the settings pages and visual components, enhancing the user interface and overall experience of the ground control station.
linux-osios-androidiosdroneground
PX4/PX4-Autopilot
Mar 2014 - Jun 2022
PX4 Autopilot Software
Role in this project:Back-end & Embedded Systems Engineer
Back-end & Embedded Systems EngineerContributions:1 review, 95 commits, 31 PRs in 8 years 4 months
Contributions summary:Don made several contributions to the PX4 Autopilot codebase, focusing on improvements to the state machine logic and the file transfer protocol (FTP) implementation. Their work involved simplifying state transition code, fixing bugs related to arming and orientation detection, and enhancing the FTP functionality with sequence numbers, directory listing with file sizes, and support for various file-related commands (list, open, read, terminate). The user also added unit tests to improve the robustness of the code.
multicopteravoidancedroneuasraspberry-pi
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