Kevin Downey
Senior Software Engineer at Gateless, Inc.
Lynden, Washington, United States
Summary
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SeniorKevin Downey is a Senior Software Engineer with 17 years of experience building backend systems, currently at Gateless, Inc. and formerly a Senior Clojure Developer at World Singles Networks and a core engineer at Sonian where he built large AWS-based data processing pipelines. He’s an active open-source contributor in the Clojure ecosystem, improving core.async exception handling, refactoring Loom for code quality, and adding Clojure-native backends to cucumber-jvm. Kevin focuses on robust, maintainable systems—removing Java dependencies, fixing reflection warnings, and integrating testing tools into build workflows—showing both deep language expertise and practical engineering hygiene. Based in Lynden, Washington, he combines attention to low-level correctness with production-scale experience, often tackling subtle edge cases in asynchronous and graph-processing code. Colleagues would note his knack for quietly improving tooling and testability across projects rather than flashy rewrites.
17 years of coding experience
6 years of employment as a software developer
Stackoverflow
96reputation
388reached
1answer
0questions
Github Skills (22)
asynchronous10
library-design10
json10
graph-algorithms10
back-end-development10
clojure-cli10
async10
testing10
macros10
cucumber-jvm10
leiningen10
refactor10
clojure10
exception-handling10
performance-optimization10
Programming languages (13)
Github contributions (5)
clojure/core.async
Sep 2016 - Mar 2020
Facilities for async programming and communication in Clojure
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:9 commits in 3 years 6 months
Contributions summary:Kevin focused on improving the exception handling within the Clojure `go` macro, as evidenced by the numerous commits modifying the `ioc_macros.clj` file. Their contributions involved restructuring exception handling logic, addressing nested `try/catch` scenarios, and ensuring proper behavior in both normal and exceptional execution paths. They also made test suite adjustments to align with the exception handling modifications, including updates to `ioc_macros_test.clj` and `runner_tests.cljs`.
non-blockingcommunicationfacilitiesclojurescriptasync
aysylu/loom
Mar 2014 - Mar 2014
Graph library for Clojure. Mailing list https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/loom-clj
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:6 commits in 1 day
Contributions summary:Kevin primarily refactored code, changing `:use` to `:require` in Clojure files within the `loom` library. They also made changes to project dependencies with a `lein check clean` command. Further commits involved protocol fixes, clean-up tasks, and code formatting improvements using tools like `lein bikeshed` and `lein eastwood`. These commits indicate a focus on code quality, dependency management, and potentially updating project infrastructure.
groupsgraph-librarymailing-listforummailing
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