Don Morrison
Director Of Engineering at MapLight
Reno, Nevada, United States
Summary
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RockstarDon Morrison is a Director of Engineering with 18 years of experience building high-performance, user-focused software teams and products, currently leading engineering at MapLight to advance transparency and civic tech. A hands-on leader who prefers a "lead-from-the-front" approach, he bridges strategy and execution—often stepping into code to refactor critical systems and improve reliability for high-traffic applications. He co-founded and scaled a profitable consulting firm, owning product strategy, hiring, and P&L while delivering bespoke engineering solutions for diverse clients. An active contributor to the Ruby ecosystem, his open-source work includes performance optimizations to ClosureTree and structural improvements to Virtus, reflecting deep Rails and back-end expertise. Don pairs technical problem-solving with empathetic team coaching, and he brings practical experience in zero-downtime deployments and data-driven product roadmaps. When not shipping software, he practices Aikido, revealing a disciplined, centered approach to leadership and conflict resolution.
17 years of coding experience
24 years of employment as a software developer
Stackoverflow
31reputation
1kreached
0answers
1question
Github Skills (12)
activerecord10
configuration-management10
ruby-rails10
metaprogramming10
rails10
sql10
ruby10
database-optimization9
testing9
documentation8
api-design8
google-bigquery6
Programming languages (11)
Github contributions (5)
solnic/virtus
May 2013 - Oct 2013
[DISCONTINUED ] Attributes on Steroids for Plain Old Ruby Objects
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:26 commits, 2 comments in 5 months
Contributions summary:Don primarily focused on enhancing the `Virtus` library, an attribute management system for Ruby objects. Their contributions included implementing a module builder for creating custom Virtus modules, which involved configuration and coercion options. They also refactored and documented the library, addressing global configuration settings and deprecating obsolete methods. The user's work involved core changes to the library's structure and functionality.
rubysteroidsdry-rbdiscontinuedplain
ClosureTree/closure_tree
Dec 2012 - Dec 2012
Easily and efficiently make your ActiveRecord models support hierarchies
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:6 commits in 1 day
Contributions summary:Don focused on optimizing the `hash_tree` method within the ClosureTree library. Their contributions include refactoring database queries to improve performance, specifically by eliminating self-joins and using inner joins. They also implemented the use of `build_nested_hash` for creating hash trees and addressed self-references within the hierarchies. Furthermore, the user worked on applying the use of a computed column.
closure-treerailsdescendantshierarchiesancestry
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