Ken Coar
Open Software Developer at Various Companies
Raleigh, North Carolina, United States
Summary
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SeniorKen Coar is an open software developer with roots in programming dating back to 1975 and almost three decades focused on open source since 1995. A founding member and long-time leader of The Apache Software Foundation, he blends deep systems experience—from DEC and IBM-era VMS and UNIX work to modern Ruby development—with hands-on infrastructure automation (Puppet, Ansible) and platform rationalization. He has a track record of rescuing and stabilizing troubled projects (e.g., chairing Apache Geronimo) and shipping practical tooling such as middleware load-balancers and large-scale Puppet infrastructure for thousands of hosts at Red Hat. An active writer, teacher, and module author, he contributes to flagship projects like Apache HTTP Server documentation and maintains numerous Ruby gems and CPAN modules. Passionate about data-driven automation, self-healing systems, and paying down technical debt, he combines historical perspective with ongoing curiosity—currently coding in Ruby while learning Go and Python. Based in Raleigh, NC, he continues to shape open source governance and tooling with a practitioner’s eye for resilience and usability.
29 years of coding experience
47 years of employment as a software developer
Stackoverflow
1,928reputation
93kreached
28answers
46questions
Github Skills (12)
apache10
documentation10
http-protocol9
html8
cgi7
htaccess6
css6
seo6
fonts6
php6
lowercase6
mod-rewrite6
Programming languages (7)
Github contributions (5)
apache/httpd
Apr 1997 - Apr 2015
Mirror of Apache HTTP Server. Issues: http://issues.apache.org
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:955 commits in 18 years 3 months
Contributions summary:Ken's contributions focused on enhancing the existing documentation by adding detailed answers to frequently asked questions, specifically about the CGI specification, web authentication methods, error messages, and the Apache license. The user also worked on incorporating information about the "XBitHack Full" mechanism for caching parsed documents and the handling of MIDI files within the server environment. Furthermore, the user updated the HTML and formatting throughout the documentation, ensuring that it maintained consistency and was usable across different viewing environments.
apacheapache-http-serverhttpd
RoUS/dumb-logger
Jan 2015 - May 2018
Contributions:23 pushes, 2 branches, 2 tags in 3 years 3 months
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