Nachos!

Hi, I'm Michael! 👋🏻

I am a self-taught software engineer who most recently worked at Coder (link opens in new tab), where I did professional open-source. There, I was responsible for two key projects. The first was Coder's official SDK (among other plugins) for Spotify Backstage (link opens in new tab). This eventually led to me giving a talk for platformengineering.org (link opens in new tab). The other was rebooting the Coder Registry (link opens in new tab) into an open-source ecosystem, all to make it easier for you to bring your favorite dev tool into the Coder platform (link opens in new tab).

I'm always happy to chip in wherever people need me, and have implemented plenty of full-stack features for companies like Netflix, Goldman-Sachs, and Discord. Nowadays I do more AI/agentic programming professionally, but still do "boomer programming" as a hobby. I'm an active member in Philadelphia's PHL Code Club (link opens in new tab), and just think programming is neat in general.

(Also, I very sincerely apologize for how boring this website is right now. I want to make it a lot more goofy and fun in the future!)

Find Michael Smith on Github (link opens in new tab) Find Michael Smith on Linkedin (link opens in new tab) Email me!

Experience

  • Worked from to

    Coder

    / Role: Software Engineer – Core Team, North America Region

    My main claim to fame, and I still can’t believe that I was able to work as a professional open-source dev, much less get the opportunities that I did.

    Responsibilities

    • Designed all frontend components and APIs for Coder’s SDK in Spotify’s Backstage platform, unlocking sales for 10+ Fortune 500 companies, and driving a ~20% increase in marketing seminar attendance in H1 2024.
    • Co-led rewrite for the Coder Registry Terraform Server, delivering full rewrite for critical infrastructure from Next.js to Go in two months. Improved server availability from ~93% in late 2024 to +99.99% in all of 2025.
    • Designed user contribution flows with CI pipelines, validation tooling, and build process updates for the launch of the Coder Registry open-source repo, increasing asset downloads by 24 million since Jan 2025.
    • Acted as Code Owner for flagship product’s frontend, guiding open-source contributors and four global teams on UI engineering, React, and CSS best practices. Helped reduce turnaround for PRs by ~2 days in Q3 2025.
    • Owned implementations and test suites for state management in the flagship frontend, designing well-tested, type-safe tools for WebSocket message parsing, pagination prefetching, and Go-to-TypeScript SSR hydration.
    • Partnered with hiring department and engineering managers for over 20 months to refine job descriptions, and test-drive take-home and live-coding challenges. Helped produce internal training materials for hiring.
  • Worked from to

    MOM’s Organic Market

    / Role: Data Department – Central Office

    Responsibilities

    • Built BigQuery pipelines for product catalogs. Automated four-hour cleaning processes for datasets with 100k+ items into reproducible, two-second tasks, while reducing missing data fields by 45% for accurate reporting.
    • Rewrote legacy scripts into Google Apps Script, increasing the performance for fuzzy matching, data querying, and automated reporting by +400%, and improving integrations with in-house JavaScript tooling.
    • Worked on a broker management tool in Angular, creating various components for the in-house design system, and wrote algorithms for modeling rapidly-changing broker relationships.
    • Codified formal guidelines for doing code reviews, raising average ZenDesk SLA ticket compliance by 28%.
  • Worked from to

    MOM’s Organic Market

    / Role: Buyer – Wellness Department

    In a way, this is how I started my software journey. I made a few scripts and tools to help with ordering at the store level, and after a while, someone at the Central Office took notice, offering me an opportunity to jump into the Data Department and support over 1000 employees directly.

    Accomplishments
    • Most profitable wellness department in the company in 2019.
    • Most profitable store in the company in 2019.
    Responsibilities
    • Created Python scripts for generating low-stock inventory reports, slashing overstock and out-of-stock counts for the department by an average of 5% per period.
    • Created a UI for cross-referencing shelf tags against inventory backstock to identify which items could be stocked out, speeding up the process for replacing inventory by an average of 2 employee hours per day.
    • Performed inventory audits to reconcile backstock against database inventory counts, addressing variances in inventory value by a minimum of $10,000 per audit.