Ross Donaldson
Software Engineer at squarespace
Portland, Oregon, United States
Summary
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RockstarRoss Donaldson is a Senior Staff Software Engineer and infrastructure-oriented information scientist with 12+ years of experience designing resilient, maintainable systems and mentoring engineering teams. He has led caching, relational storage, and PaaS efforts at Squarespace and now drives infrastructure at Ramp, combining a foundation in usability research with expertise in data engineering, SRE, and API/service-boundary design. Ross teaches and authors internal bootcamp curriculum, runs mentorship programs, and treats software engineering as a craft—prioritizing documentation, testing, and automation. An active open-source contributor, he has improved popular Emacs tooling and contributed front-end data-visualization components, reflecting fluency from UI to low-level systems. Based in Portland, he brings a rare mix of cross-discipline communication skills, functional-programming fluency (Golang, Rust, F#), and hands-on “data plumber” pragmatism to complex platform problems.
12 years of coding experience
Github Skills (22)
data-visualizations10
javascript10
charts10
data-visualisation10
language-server-protocol10
go10
emacs10
fsharp10
data-visualization10
syntax-checking10
react10
test-automation10
json-parser9
json9
jsonp9
Programming languages (20)
Github contributions (5)
emacs-lsp/lsp-mode
Oct 2019 - Oct 2022
Emacs client/library for the Language Server Protocol
Role in this project:
Full-stack Developer
Full-stack DeveloperContributions:2 reviews, 12 commits, 13 PRs in 3 years 1 month
Contributions summary:Ross primarily contributes to the Emacs client for the Language Server Protocol, adding features and improving the integration with different language servers. They developed and refined the support for the F# language server, adding new options and customizations. The contributions include adding new functionalities, making changes to existing configurations, and enhancing the overall functionality of the LSP client, including the introduction of improvements to go and terraform language clients.
emacslanguage-server-protocoljavajavascriptcpp
flycheck/flycheck
Jan 2019 - Mar 2019
On the fly syntax checking for GNU Emacs
Role in this project:Backend & Test Automation Engineer
Backend & Test Automation EngineerContributions:7 commits, 1 PR, 13 comments in 1 month
Contributions summary:Ross primarily focused on enhancing the Go syntax checking capabilities of the Emacs plugin. They implemented and integrated a new checker for the `staticcheck` tool, replacing the deprecated `megacheck`. They also refactored the code to utilize JSON output for more detailed error parsing. Additionally, the user added and modified test files for the `staticcheck` integration, demonstrating a focus on thorough testing and quality assurance.
emacsgnusyntax-checkingflycheck
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