Mark Mcdowall
Staff Software Engineer at Plex, Inc.
Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolMark Mcdowall is a Staff Software Engineer in Vancouver with 15 years of experience building resilient back-end systems and thoughtful full-stack features, currently driving engineering at Plex. He has deep expertise in the .NET/React “arr” ecosystem, contributing bug fixes and new features across well-known open-source projects like Sonarr, Radarr, Lidarr, Readarr and Prowlarr, and has hands-on experience improving download client integrations, parsing edge cases, and web client stability for Plex Media Player. His background spans Co-Founder work and DevOps/operations roles, giving him a practical systems-first perspective on reliability, CI/CD and deploy-time issues. Known for tackling tricky edge cases—HTTPS cert validation, URL registration timing, and custom script testing—he blends pragmatic backend problem-solving with UI polish.
16 years of coding experience
10 years of employment as a software developer
British Columbia Institute of Technology (BCIT)
Github Skills (42)
javascript10
back-end-development10
apidoc10
net10
dotnet10
asp-net10
api10
front-end-development10
indexer10
dotnet-core10
webclient10
csharp10
backend10
react10
conan9
Programming languages (13)
Github contributions (5)
Sonarr/Sonarr
Sep 2010 - Jan 2023
Smart PVR for newsgroup and bittorrent users.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:1 release, 1568 reviews, 5737 commits in 12 years 5 months
Contributions summary:Mark's contributions focused on improving the backend functionality of the application. They implemented fixes for core features related to managing episodes, including ensuring the correct series is used for manual file imports and addressing issues with handling episode file deletion. The commits demonstrate involvement with parsing episode titles and handling various aspects of series management, indicating work within the core logic of the application. The user's code changes involved fixing edge cases in the software.
bittorrent
plexinc/plex-media-player
Feb 2017 - Dec 2019
Next generation Plex Desktop/Embedded Client
Role in this project:Full-stack Developer
Full-stack DeveloperContributions:151 commits, 2 PRs, 124 pushes in 2 years 9 months
Contributions summary:Mark primarily focused on updating and maintaining the web client components within the Plex Media Player project. This involved bumping versions of web client dependencies and updating related configurations. Additionally, the user made changes to the versioning of the player itself, and adjusted URL encoding within the code. They also reverted a change related to seek support, likely due to issues encountered with Live TV functionality.
plex
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