James Duncan Davidson

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James Duncan Davidson bigraphy, stories - Software Developer and Photographer

James Duncan Davidson : biography

July 29, 1970 –

James Duncan Davidson (born July 29, 1970 in Lubbock, Texas) is an American photographer and former 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.

He was raised in Oklahoma and Texas, and is currently self‐employed as both a software consultant and a photographer. He is a resident of Portland, Oregon.

Duncan has in the recent past (2005–2006) turned his programming interests and attention in the direction of Ruby on Rails. In tandem with well‐known Rails guru Mike Clark, Davidson has 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 and led the TEDxOilSpill Expedition.

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