James Duncan Davidson

James Duncan Davidson (born July 29, 1970 in Lubbock, Texas) is an American photographer and a software developer. While a software engineer at Sun Microsystems (1997–2001), Davidson created Tomcat, a Java-based webserver application and the Ant Java-based build tool. Davidson is the author or co-author of several books on both using and writing software, including Learning Cocoa with Objective-C, Cocoa in a Nutshell, Running Mac OS X Panther, and Mac OS X Panther Hacks, all published by O’Reilly Media. He also contributed to Agile Web Development with Rails, published by The Pragmatic Programmers.

Contents

• Rails conf 2013 keynote by james duncan davidson
• Featured interview james duncan davidson
• References

He was raised in Oklahoma and Texas, and as he writes in his Medium article, he is currently a software engineer at Microsoft working on Wunderlist, and a photographer. He is a resident of Berlin.

In 2005 Davidson turned his programming interests and attention in the direction of Ruby on Rails. In tandem with well-known Rails guru Mike Clark, he designed and built some of the most complex and robust early Rails applications.

Starting in 2005, Duncan added photography to his other professional focuses. He has served as the primary event photographer at several high-profile technology conferences. Since 2009 he has been the main stage photographer for TED conferences, photographing every TED and TEDGlobal event. In 2010, Duncan was the photographer for the Mission Blue Voyage in the Galapagos Islands and led the TEDxOilSpill Expedition in the Gulf of Mexico. Davidson is also known for his artistic travel photos, often with an eye for architectural details, a clear reference to his university studies in architecture.

He is co-founder and co-owner (along with Greg Koenig) of Luma Labs, a small company based in Portland, OR focused on making high quality camera accessories.