Martin Mac Donell
Co-Founder at bitdrift
San Francisco, California, United States
Summary
🤩
RockstarMartin Mac Donell is a seasoned engineering leader and serial founder with 18 years building high-scale mobile, infrastructure, and security systems from San Francisco. As former Senior Director of Engineering at Lyft he led Security, Privacy, Production Infrastructure and Mobile Infrastructure and previously drove Lyft’s complete iOS rewrite in Swift as a Principal Engineer. He co-founded multiple startups (including Atommica/jampp and The Whuffie Bank) and now leads bitdrift, combining product idealism with pragmatic operational rigor. Martin is an active open-source contributor across front-end, iOS SDKs and cloud-native projects—his work ranges from a popular jQuery countdown plugin to fixes in the Envoy proxy and the Braintree iOS SDK. He has a knack for simplifying complex systems (grouping undo semantics in XVim, clarifying payment provider state) and for spotting platform-specific edge cases, like Chrome inactive-tab bugs. Colleagues describe him as an idealist who relentlessly pursues elegance, efficiency, and power in products.
18 years of coding experience
20 years of employment as a software developer
English, Spanish, Portuguese
Stackoverflow
3,233reputation
180kreached
34answers
2questions
swift
top-5%
uiview
top-5%
ios
top-5%
warnings
top-5%
Github Skills (46)
objective-c10
xcode-plugin10
javascript10
c-language10
ios10
jquery10
plugin-architecture10
plugin-development10
vi10
vim10
go10
sdk10
front-end-development10
cprogramming-language10
keybindings10
Programming languages (17)
Github contributions (5)
Reflejo/jquery-countdown
Jul 2009 - May 2013
Amazing jQuery Countdown plugin!, Check it out.
Role in this project:
Front-end Developer
Front-end DeveloperContributions:16 commits in 3 years 10 months
Contributions summary:Martin primarily contributed to the development of a jQuery countdown plugin. Their initial commits included the creation of the core countdown functionality in JavaScript. They then extended the plugin with features such as specifying custom formats, adding a callback function upon timer completion, and implementing visual enhancements like new digit art. Additionally, the user fixed a Chrome-specific bug related to inactive tabs.
jquery-countdown
envoyproxy/envoy
Sep 2016 - Jun 2022
Cloud-native high-performance edge/middle/service proxy
Role in this project:Backend Developer
Backend DeveloperContributions:13 reviews, 41 commits, 23 PRs in 5 years 9 months
Contributions summary:Martin contributed to the core functionality of the Envoy proxy by addressing various code-related issues. Their work involved removing deprecated code, adding necessary overrides, and changing types to prevent architecture assumptions. They also addressed specific bugs and optimized code, demonstrating a strong understanding of the codebase. The user's contributions included modifying critical files related to runtime, stats, and HTTP protocols, indicating a focus on backend system improvements.
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