Kurt Mckee
Software Engineer at feedparser
United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolKurt Mckee is a software engineer with 17 years of professional experience and over 15 years of Python expertise, currently applying his skills at the University of Chicago while maintaining the long-running feedparser project. He built Halcyon, the automation system that standardizes firmware and configuration across Hitachi Vantara’s global distribution centers, materially improving outbound system quality and earning him leadership of its maintenance team. Kurt’s work spans infrastructure, test automation, and backend reliability—evident from contributions to high-profile Python projects like redis-py, cookiecutter, and watchdog where he improved robustness, type-safety, and cross-platform testing. He pairs hands-on engineering (servers, storage, networking) with strong documentation and QA instincts, often addressing subtle deprecations, platform quirks, and edge-case error handling. Known for pragmatic improvements rather than flashy rewrites, he focuses on making complex systems maintainable and auditable. Trained in mathematics at Northwestern, he brings a methodical, detail-oriented approach to large-scale operational software.
16 years of coding experience
3 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor of Science Mathematics, Bachelor of Science Mathematics at Northwestern University
Stackoverflow
1,410reputation
230kreached
34answers
1question
Github Skills (47)
git10
pylint10
debug10
database-api10
redis-py10
restructuredtext10
pytest10
python10
redis10
sphinx10
testing10
mypy10
databases10
test-framework10
cookiecutter10
Programming languages (22)
Github contributions (5)
kurtmckee/feedparser
Jan 2011 - Oct 2022
Parse feeds in Python
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:40 reviews, 457 commits, 242 PRs in 11 years 11 months
Contributions summary:Kurt focused on improving the feedparser library's functionality and maintainability. The contributions included wrapping lines and removing duplicates to improve code readability, as well as fixing issues related to handling text/plain content and relative URIs within the documentation. The user also implemented a fix to prevent the 'style' attribute from always slipping through HTML sanitizing.
rsspythonfeedsrdfparser
anishathalye/dotbot
Apr 2022 - Dec 2022
A tool that bootstraps your dotfiles ⚡️
Role in this project:DevOps Engineer & Test Automation Engineer
DevOps Engineer & Test Automation EngineerContributions:5 reviews, 26 commits, 13 PRs in 8 months
Contributions summary:Kurt primarily focused on improving the testing infrastructure and addressing Windows-specific issues within the `dotbot` project. They implemented platform-specific CPython version requirements for Windows and migrated CLI argument tests to Python. Furthermore, the user resolved Windows-specific issues related to cleaning, linking, and create functionalities and addressed several other test-related issues. These contributions were geared towards ensuring cross-platform compatibility and improving the reliability of the testing process.
dotfilesbashshellzsh
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