Duncan Beevers

Software Engineer since Oct. 2006

Duncan is involved in lots of aspects of making Kongregate fly, including model design and implementation, caching strategies, and client-side functionality. He believes in pragmatic optimization and that programming should be fun.

Kongregate is all about playing games, and Duncan was the driving force behind making Kongregate's game page fully cacheable. To help reach the goal of a blazing-fast game page he architected the JavaScript front-end of Kongregate's chat client, and built it with extensibility in mind. A small developer community has since sprung up, contributing improvements via Greasemonkey scripts and Firefox Add-ons.

Kongregate is powered by a number of open-source technologies, and Duncan loves to push back improvements to those tools. His contributions to open-source include fixes to Rails, from top-level markup generation down to deep query-management, and to Prototype's core form serialization and AJAX request implementations. He's extracted and open-sourced numerous tools from Kongregate's inner-workings, such our asset packager, and schema change manager.

Duncan participates and mentors in online developer communities like Stack Overflow and shares code on Github. In addition to code, he also likes to share knowledge directly through participation in the local user-groups like The Portland Ruby Brigade, Portland JavaScript Admirers and DorkbotPDX, and by speaking at conferences like RailsConf Europe, and Portland's own Open Source Bridge.

Duncan blogs at www.dweebd.com, and networks at LinkedIn and Working With Rails.

He loves the rain, bicycling, his family, animals, the night sky, pine needles, techno, and sci-fi.