Kevin Mcconnell
Director at Beak Ltd
City of Edinburgh, Scotland, United Kingdom
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolKevin Mcconnell is a senior software engineering leader and director based in Edinburgh with 17 years of professional experience and over two decades of hands-on work building large, scalable, and resilient web applications. He combines executive leadership—CTO and head-of-platform roles—with active freelance consulting through his current company, Beak Ltd, guiding teams from architecture to production. A pragmatic full-stack contributor, Kevin has improved developer experience and deployment reliability in notable open-source projects such as Hotwire Turbo, Trix, and Basecamp’s Kamal, touching front-end editor behavior, Turbo Streams, and rolling-deploy infrastructure. He is comfortable moving between product-facing features and low-level operational fixes, from form/frame interactions to Dockerized health checks and Traefik pinning. Known for shipping practical, test-driven improvements, he brings entrepreneurial instincts from multiple director-level roles and a Computer Science degree from Napier University.
17 years of coding experience
23 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor of Science (BSc), Computer Science, Bachelor of Science (BSc), Computer Science at Napier University
Github Skills (23)
editors10
javascript10
docker10
text-editor10
configuration-management10
editor10
dockers10
cicd10
front-end-development10
turbo10
html10
custom-element10
traefik10
web-development10
deployment-automation10
Programming languages (9)
Github contributions (5)
basecamp/kamal
Mar 2023 - Mar 2025
Deploy web apps anywhere.
Role in this project:
DevOps Engineer
DevOps EngineerContributions:13 reviews, 5 PRs, 1 push in 1 year 11 months
Contributions summary:Kevin primarily focused on enhancing the deployment process and infrastructure for the application. Key contributions include pinning specific versions of dependencies like Traefik, allowing for group-based deployments and introducing percentage-based rolling deployments. They also moved health checks into Docker, added the ability to customize audit broadcasts with environment variables, and ensured a consistent Traefik service name.
containerszero-downtimezerorailsdocker
hotwired/turbo
Jul 2022 - Jan 2023
The speed of a single-page web application without having to write any JavaScript
Role in this project:Full-stack Developer
Full-stack DeveloperContributions:63 reviews, 15 commits, 33 PRs in 6 months
Contributions summary:Kevin primarily focused on enhancing the functionality of the Hotwired Turbo library. Their work involved implementing features for handling Turbo Streams with GET requests, modifying form submissions, and refining the behavior of frame interactions, like handling `data-turbo-stream` and `turbo-visit-control` within frame contexts. They also addressed related issues, ensuring correct behavior in various scenarios, including view transitions and caching, and corrected existing test failures. The user's contributions spanned frontend and core library modifications.
single-web-pagehotwirespeedjavascriptweb-application
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