John Downs
Principal Software Engineer at Microsoft
Auckland, Auckland, New Zealand
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolJohn Downs is a Principal Software Engineer based in Auckland with over a decade of experience designing and leading globally distributed, cloud-native solutions—particularly on Microsoft Azure. He blends deep academic rigor (a PhD in HCI) with practical delivery, having led SaaS, multitenant, and high-scale architectures for enterprise customers and now shaping Azure Patterns & Practices at Microsoft. John moves effortlessly between CTO-level strategy and hands-on implementation, driving pragmatic architectural tradeoffs that balance business needs, global distribution, and operational realities. He’s a respected open-source contributor to Azure tooling—adding real-world Bicep and Quickstart template examples for Front Door, Redis, and serverless deployments—bringing deployment automation and infra-as-code expertise into his guidance. Known for clear communication and mentoring global teams, he pairs a meticulous attention to quality with a preference for pragmatic, stage-appropriate design decisions.
10 years of coding experience
13 years of employment as a software developer
MSc Computer Science, MSc Computer Science at The University of AucklandThe University of Melbourne
Github Skills (22)
bicep10
architecture10
microsoft-azure10
azure-resource-manager10
azure-arm-templates10
arm-templates10
resource-manager10
arm10
powershell10
azure10
architectures10
devops10
cloud-computing9
atom-editor9
cicd9
Programming languages (15)
Github contributions (5)
MicrosoftDocs/architecture-center
Nov 2019 - Jan 2023
Open source documentation for the Azure Architecture Center on Microsoft Learn.
Role in this project:
Full-stack Developer
Full-stack DeveloperContributions:5 reviews, 648 commits, 3 PRs in 3 years 2 months
Contributions summary:John's commits primarily involve merging branches and updating the `feed.atom` file, which suggests contributions focused on content updates and potentially integrating changes from the main development branch. Based on the repository description and the nature of changes to the atom feed, it is likely the user is helping maintain the Azure Architecture Center documentation. The updates seem to focus on incorporating new content entries, most likely with links to the updated Azure architecture documentation.
centercloudguidancepatternsmicrosoft
Azure/azure-quickstart-templates
Jun 2017 - Nov 2022
Azure Quickstart Templates
Role in this project:DevOps Engineer
DevOps EngineerContributions:54 reviews, 232 commits, 164 PRs in 5 years 6 months
Contributions summary:John's commits focused on updating and validating the metadata associated with Azure Quickstart templates. They modified PowerShell scripts, specifically the `Validate-Metadata.ps1` script, to improve date validation and ensure metadata conforms to the expected format. Furthermore, they added new Bicep files and samples to support infrastructure-as-code deployments for resources like Front Door and Azure Functions, and updated existing templates with location and code changes.
bicep-templatestemplatesbicepazurearm-templates
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