Ken Harris - Software Engineer

Ken Harris

Software Engineer

Seattle, Washington, United States

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Summary

🤩

Rockstar

Ken Harris is a seasoned software engineer in Seattle with 17 years of hands-on experience building developer-focused tooling and language infrastructure. He contributes to high-performance open-source projects—most notably improving the Down Swift Markdown renderer for robust CommonMark output—and has deep compiler experience, enhancing Unicode and character handling in a Lisp-to-JavaScript compiler. Comfortable across mobile and back-end codebases, Ken blends pragmatic engineering with a taste for low-level correctness and cross-format rendering nuances. Describing himself as a "former/recovering programmer" hints at a pragmatic, wry approach to long-term craftsmanship and technical debt. Colleagues can expect a steady pair of hands who values correctness, interoperability, and incremental improvements that scale.

17 years of coding experience

Github Skills (16)

markdown10

compiler10

swift10

javascript10

compiler-compiler10

ios10

markdown-it10

common-lisp10

lisp10

unicode10

commonmark9

html9

macos8

xml7

latex7

Programming languages (16)

JavaC++CGoCommon LispJSONHTMLJulia

Github contributions (5)

johnxnguyen/Down

Feb 2018 - Mar 2018

Blazing fast Markdown / CommonMark rendering in Swift, built upon cmark.

Role in this project:

iOS Developer

Contributions:11 commits, 6 PRs, 1 push in 7 days

Contributions summary:Ken primarily contributes to the `down` Swift library for Markdown rendering. Their work focuses on adapting code to Swift 3 conventions, integrating with and utilizing the cmark library, and enhancing rendering capabilities across different formats. The commits reveal efforts to improve the `DownOptions` configuration, add features for custom styling in attributed string output, and ensure consistent behavior in various output formats (CommonMark, LaTeX, Groff, XML, and HTML).

commonmarkblazingtvoscmarkmac

jscl-project/jscl

May 2013 - Jun 2013

A Lisp-to-JavaScript compiler bootstrapped from Common Lisp

Role in this project:

Back-end Developer

Contributions:27 commits, 2 comments in 1 month

Contributions summary:Ken implemented and refined core functionalities of the Lisp-to-JavaScript compiler. Their primary focus was on enhancing character handling and Unicode support within the compiler, introducing features to ensure accurate codepoint representation and character manipulation. This involved modifications to the prelude, compiler, and character definition files, incorporating character comparison operations and case-insensitive functions, ultimately expanding the capabilities of the compiler to support Unicode characters. They also added features such as CHAR-NAME and NAME-CHAR for ASCII names, enhancing the compiler's utility for character processing.

javascript-compilerjavascriptcompilerjscllisp-interpreter

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