James Mccoy
Senior Principal Software Engineer at Dell EMC
Holliston, Massachusetts, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top School
Top expert inNeovim and Vim Ecosystem Development
James Mccoy is a Senior Principal Software Engineer with 23 years of experience, currently driving platform and engineering excellence at Dell Technologies. He combines deep systems and C/C++ expertise with a history of improving developer tooling and test automation—contributions that span high-profile open-source projects including Vim, fish-shell, msgpack-c, Alacritty and Kitty. Known for pragmatic refactors and bug-for-bug robustness, he has strengthened version-control integrations, cross-platform builds, and bindings for large projects like Apache Subversion. James pairs enterprise impact with sustained upstream contributions as a longtime FOSS hacker, frequently improving build systems, correcting subtle type/endianness issues, and hardening test suites. His background in electrical engineering and a CS master's from Northeastern underpin a low-level mindset that surfaces in both terminal emulators and language bindings. Based in Holliston, MA, he quietly balances large-scale product engineering with meticulous open-source craftsmanship.
23 years of coding experience
10 years of employment as a software developer
Master's Degree, Computer Science, Master's Degree, Computer Science at Northeastern University
English
Stackoverflow
42,139reputation
2.5mreached
254answers
1question
profiling
top-1%
sed
top-5%
git
top-1%
grep
top-5%
debugging
top-1%
regex
top-5%
Github Skills (72)
dependency-management10
python10
vimscript10
testing10
c1110
perl10
c1710
vim10
subversion10
profiling10
mime-types10
optimization10
irc-bot10
text-manipulation10
rust10
Programming languages (25)
Github contributions (5)
mhinz/vim-signify
Jul 2013 - Dec 2022
:heavy_plus_sign: Show a diff using Vim its sign column.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:5 reviews, 58 commits, 40 PRs in 9 years 7 months
Contributions summary:James primarily contributed to the `vim-signify` plugin by modifying core functionalities, particularly related to handling diff hunks and integrating with version control systems. They refactored the "jump to hunk" feature, changing how hunks and signs are managed. Additionally, the user added support for the AccuRev version control system and fixed issues related to the display of deleted lines and other bug fixes, as well as refactoring code to use new utility functions and correcting indexing.
vimneovimsignsvcsmercurial
vim/vim
Aug 2015 - Apr 2026
The official Vim repository
Role in this project:QA Engineer / Test Automation Engineer
QA Engineer / Test Automation EngineerContributions:17 reviews, 130 PRs, 339 comments in 10 years 9 months
Contributions summary:James primarily contributed to the Vim repository by modifying and adding test cases. Their work involved adjusting existing tests, such as those related to recovery, and creating new tests for features like debugging and terminal functionality. The user consistently updated the tests to accommodate changes in the codebase, address potential failures on different systems, and improve the overall test coverage of Vim's features. The changes included adjustments to test logic, path handling, and environment setup, as well as the introduction of new test cases to ensure the correct behavior of various Vim functionalities.
vimctext-editorcross-platform
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.