Simon Mac Donald
Staff Software Engineer at Sanity
Ottawa, Ontario, Canada
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolSimon Mac Donald is a Staff Software Engineer with 15+ years of experience building mobile and web applications, and a long history of leadership roles from Head of Developer Experience to Developer Advocate at Adobe. He blends deep hands-on expertise in Java, JavaScript, Ruby and native/hybrid mobile platforms with a specialty in telephony and speech recognition dating back to his work on Mitel’s 6500 Speech Server. An active open-source maintainer in the Cordova/PhoneGap ecosystem, Simon has contributed cross-platform plugins and core platform fixes—including notable Android and iOS improvements to push notifications, media capture and barcode scanning—and authored the PhoneGap Push Service. He’s equally at home writing developer docs and tooling as he is shipping native integrations, and has a track record of turning complex platform gaps into usable developer experiences. Based in Ottawa, he combines systems-level thinking with practical product-driven delivery and a knack for bridging developer needs with platform constraints.
16 years of coding experience
28 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor of Computer Science, Bachelor of Computer Science at Technical University of Nova ScotiaCape Breton University
Github Skills (29)
camera-api10
phonegap10
objective-c10
javascript10
ios10
mobile-development10
cordova10
plugin-development10
bar-code10
android-sdk10
barcode-scanner10
apple-push-notifications10
android-development10
push-notifications10
java10
Programming languages (27)
Github contributions (5)
phonegap/phonegap-plugin-push
Apr 2015 - Sep 2020
Register and receive push notifications
Role in this project:
Mobile Developer (Android)
Mobile Developer (Android)Contributions:686 commits, 203 PRs, 704 pushes in 5 years 5 months
Contributions summary:Simon primarily contributed to the Android implementation of the phonegap-plugin-push repository. Their work focused on refining the push notification API, including sending and receiving events. The user added features to handle multiple notifications, control notification visibility, and set various notification properties, such as the large icon and sound. They also refactored package names and integrated with the Firebase Cloud Messaging (FCM) service.
push-notifications
purplecabbage/phonegap-plugins
May 2011 - Jul 2013
Plugins for use with PhoneGap.
Role in this project:Mobile Developer (Android)
Mobile Developer (Android)Contributions:203 commits in 2 years 2 months
Contributions summary:Simon primarily contributed to the `purplecabbage/phonegap-plugins` repository by developing and updating Android-specific plugins for the PhoneGap framework. Their work included creating a Text-to-Speech (TTS) plugin and an FTP client plugin. They also updated existing plugins like the ChildBrowser, BarcodeScanner, and VideoPlayer to align with newer versions of the PhoneGap framework. These updates involved changes in the plugin architecture and adapting to new API standards, as well as fixing zoom issues in the ChildBrowser.
phonegap
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