John Mcdowall
Founder at Owl.So
Canada
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolJohn Mcdowall is a pragmatic full-stack founder and engineering leader with 14+ years building web and blockchain products, specializing in JavaScript, React, Ruby, and Rails. He’s the original creator of the Ganache desktop Ethereum tool and has contributed core improvements to the Ganache-CLI RPC client, reflecting deep hands-on expertise in developer tooling for Ethereum since 2014. As an ex-CTO and VP/Director of Engineering, he has repeatedly reorganized teams, instituted lean delivery practices and DORA-driven metrics, and shipped secure, scalable platforms across startups and large government projects. He runs small agencies and product efforts while staying technical in a player-coach mode, hiring and mentoring senior engineers and defining platform architectures. Beyond product work he authors lean books, contributes to open source, and continually sharpens his craft by building his own tools and exploring new technical frontiers. Based in Canada, he combines business and customer-development instincts with a rare ability to translate UX and product needs into robust engineering solutions.
14 years of coding experience
20 years of employment as a software developer
BSc Hons Computing Science, BSc Hons Computing Science at University of Glasgow
English
Github Skills (22)
javascript10
solidity10
css10
contract10
front-end-development10
ethereum10
blockchain10
html10
truffle10
smart-contracts10
nodejs10
website-design10
testing9
webpack9
webpacker9
Programming languages (13)
Github contributions (5)
trufflesuite/trufflesuite.github.io
Sep 2016 - Sep 2017
Staging Repo of Build Artifacts for Truffle Suite. Find the source at https://github.com/trufflesuite/trufflesuite.com
Role in this project:
Full-stack Developer
Full-stack DeveloperContributions:125 commits, 5 PRs, 104 pushes in 1 year
Contributions summary:John reorganized and refactored the project's styles and scripts, separating vendor-specific files to improve code linting. They added a feature card with details about modular design. Additionally, the user worked on linking up tutorial lists on the landing page, and made updates to the footer. They incorporated visual tweaks and enhanced the tutorial page with an "edit this page" link.
ethereumtrufflesolidityartifactsstaging
trufflesuite/ganache-cli-archive
Jun 2016 - Nov 2016
Fast Ethereum RPC client for testing and development. See https://github.com/trufflesuite/ganache for current development.
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:35 commits, 10 PRs, 28 pushes in 5 months
Contributions summary:John primarily contributed to the core functionality of the Ganache-CLI archive, focusing on the Ethereum RPC client's internal workings. Their work included merging code branches, refactoring and cleaning up existing code, and implementing custom gas price and gas limit options. The user made changes to the blockchain's core logic, the test suite and the server. They implemented new functionality, and refactored existing code to improve performance and functionality.
rpcrpc-clientethereumganachetesting
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