Zach Thompson
Sr. Software Engineer at Duck Duck Go
Denver Metropolitan Area United States
Summary
🤩
RockstarZach Thompson is a senior software engineer based in the Denver area with 13 years building content management and automated content collection systems, Unix ops, and database-driven web applications. At DuckDuckGo since 2015, he focuses on backend architecture and database design, contributing to core Instant Answer infrastructure and the Community Platform where he implemented schema changes, triggers, and release-management features. His work spans languages and stacks—Perl, JavaScript, and SQL—refactoring data pipelines (YAML→JSON) and improving discoverability and metadata for search instant answers. Known for pragmatic, data-integrity minded solutions, he combines systems-level Unix administration with hands-on feature delivery for scale and reliability.
13 years of coding experience
Github Skills (15)
json10
duckduckgo10
javascript10
postgresql10
perl10
sql10
handlebars10
database-design10
questions-and-answers10
instantsearch10
database-administration9
github8
apidoc7
yaml7
api7
Programming languages (6)
Github contributions (5)
duckduckgo/duckduckgo
Jan 2015 - May 2017
DuckDuckGo Instant Answer Infrastructure
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:129 commits, 47 PRs, 92 pushes in 2 years 4 months
Contributions summary:Zach primarily contributed to the back-end infrastructure of the DuckDuckGo Instant Answers project. Their work involved adding helper functions for boolean operations, fixing bugs, and refactoring code within the `DDG::Request` module. They also focused on implementing metadata functionality for Instant Answers, and modifying the country codes for alias and rename. This suggests a focus on enhancing the core functionality and data management aspects of the Instant Answers system.
answerduckduckgoinstant-answersinfrastructureinstant
duckduckgo/zeroclickinfo-goodies
Feb 2015 - Sep 2017
DuckDuckGo Instant Answers based on Perl & JavaScript
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:179 commits, 86 PRs, 178 pushes in 2 years 6 months
Contributions summary:Zach primarily focused on enhancing the `DDG::Goodie::CheatSheets` module, which involves generating instant answers for DuckDuckGo. They refactored the module to load cheat sheets from YAML to JSON, and later modified the code to directly process the JSON data. The user also updated the front-end Handlebars templates for display, refactoring how data is displayed. Further work involved adding triggers to include other cheat sheet goodies, improving search discoverability.
javascriptduckduckgoinstant-answersperlinstant
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