Stephen Mcdonald
Sydney, New South Wales, Australia
Summary
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RockstarStephen Mcdonald is a seasoned software engineer in Sydney with 20+ years building scalable online systems across startups, agencies, ISPs and large enterprises. He blends architecture, product development, technical operations and team leadership with hands-on full‑stack work, particularly in Python and Django-based ecosystems. An active open-source maintainer, he created and contributed to projects used by Google, Mozilla and the Python Software Foundation, and has notable contributions to widely used projects such as Jekyll and google-maps client libraries. His work spans backend systems, mobile Android integrations and front-end mapping utilities—demonstrating an ability to move between infrastructure, APIs and UX-focused code. He often focuses on practical developer ergonomics: migration tooling, API client robustness, and modular refactors that make projects easier to package and maintain. Colleagues rely on him for pragmatic solutions that scale and for sustaining healthy open-source communities.
17 years of coding experience
Stackoverflow
1,736reputation
83kreached
56answers
1question
django
top-5%
Github Skills (68)
kml10
cms10
mobile-development10
python10
websocket10
geojson10
ruby10
javas10
google-map10
google-maps10
backend10
firebase10
markdown10
javascript10
client-library10
Programming languages (17)
Github contributions (5)
stephenmcd/cartridge
Dec 2009 - Dec 2018
Ecommerce for Mezzanine
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:995 commits, 51 PRs, 70 pushes in 9 years 1 month
Contributions summary:Stephen contributed primarily to the development of an e-commerce platform built with Python and Django, focusing on adding features for product variations, wishlists, and order processing. They also worked on enhancing the user interface for the shop, and integrating with payment processors. The user's contributions involved code changes to models, forms, views, and template tags.
ecommerce
googlemaps/google-maps-services-python
Apr 2015 - Nov 2018
Python client library for Google Maps API Web Services
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:157 commits, 66 PRs, 93 pushes in 3 years 7 months
Contributions summary:Stephen made several contributions to the googlemaps/google-maps-services-python repository, focusing on improving the client library. Their work included refactoring the URL encoding process to correctly handle unreserved characters and enabling the passing of keyword arguments for requests, which facilitates the use of proxy authentication. Furthermore, they implemented support for rate limiting to control API query volume.
google-maps-apipythonwebserviceclient-library
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