Ian Mccowan
Senior Software Engineer at Honor
Seattle, Washington, United States
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolIan Mccowan is a Senior Software Engineer in Seattle with 14 years of experience building maintainable, scalable systems and reducing technical debt through rigorous design and clear communication. He has driven production-scale improvements—rewriting toolchains to run on compute grids for a 500% throughput increase and enabling new-vertical product delivery—while fast-tracking into engineering leadership early in his career. Ian’s background spans full-stack product work at Bonanza, cloud SDK testing and sample automation for Microsoft projects, and back-end contributions to the popular open-source beets music library project, where he improved Python data handling and query behavior. A mathematically trained problem solver (B.A. Math/CS; M.S. Math with education emphasis), he emphasizes reusable, generalizable code and automated testing to catch regressions before customers do. He pairs hands-on implementation with mentoring and cross-team collaboration to move complex projects from prototype to production. Ian is eager to apply his systems-thinking and testing-first mindset to new challenges and learn the next domain.
14 years of coding experience
10 years of employment as a software developer
M.S., Mathematics with Education Emphasis, M.S., Mathematics with Education Emphasis at University of MinnesotaB.A., Mathematics/Computer Science, B.A., Mathematics/Computer Science at Macalester College
Github Skills (18)
music-manager10
sql-query10
continuous-integration10
python10
testing10
configuration-management10
media-library10
cli-framework10
buildbot10
musicxml10
musicbrainz9
unit-testing9
query-optimization9
file-handling9
automations8
Programming languages (15)
Github contributions (5)
beetbox/beets
Dec 2024 - Jan 2025
music library manager and MusicBrainz tagger
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:2 reviews, 5 PRs, 4 comments in 20 days
Contributions summary:Ian primarily contributed to improving the `beets` music library manager. Their work involved fixing bugs related to sorting on missing integer fields, enhancing the handling of missing data during sorting, and expanding the functionality of item types. They also added documentation updates to the changelog and plugin documentation. The user demonstrated skills in Python and database query optimization.
clipythonmusicbrainztaggermusic
valrus/catenary
Apr 2012 - Feb 2021
Contributions:5 commits, 3 pushes, 1 comment in 8 years 11 months
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