Alan Hamlett
Lead Software Engineer at WakaTime
Dominican Republic
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolAlan Hamlett is a seasoned software leader and founder with 15 years of experience building developer-focused products and tools. He founded WakaTime, which powers automatic IDE time-tracking for over 500k users and integrates with 90+ editors, and now leads engineering for WakaTeam while also building the tech social network wonderful.dev. Comfortable across backend, DevOps and full-stack work, he has deep Python expertise and a strong track record of improving robustness and cross-platform compatibility in popular open-source projects (notably WakaTime plugins, Flask-Login, WTForms and community tooling). His experience includes shipping large-scale consumer features at Airbnb and maintaining critical CLI and editor integrations that handle offline queuing, async buffering, and cross-OS packaging. Based in Vienna and active across SF, Europe and the Dominican Republic, he blends startup founding instincts with pragmatic engineering craftsmanship. A less-obvious strength: he repeatedly tackles tricky edge cases—Unicode, cross-version compatibility, and CI packaging—that keep developer tooling reliable at scale.
15 years of coding experience
10 years of employment as a software developer
BS Computer Science, BS Computer Science at The University of Texas at Dallas
Stackoverflow
3,206reputation
1.1mreached
26answers
3questions
javascript
top-5%
html
top-5%
jquery
top-5%
Github Skills (55)
asynchronous10
json10
apim10
python10
validations10
apidoc10
async10
wtforms10
vimscript10
testing10
back-end-development10
user-authentication10
authentication10
travis-ci10
vscode-extension10
Programming languages (34)
Github contributions (5)
wakatime/jetbrains-wakatime
Mar 2014 - Dec 2022
IntelliJ IDEA, PyCharm, RubyMine, PhpStorm, AppCode, AndroidStudio, Goland, Rider, & WebStorm plugin for quantifying your coding.
Role in this project:
Full-stack Developer
Full-stack DeveloperContributions:8 reviews, 378 commits, 12 PRs in 8 years 10 months
Contributions summary:Alan primarily contributed to the IntelliJ IDEA plugin, making improvements across multiple versions. Their contributions included supporting offline time logging, formatting the history file, and upgrading the external wakatime package. They also addressed platform compatibility issues and added debug messages to the log, indicating a focus on both feature enhancements and improving the plugin's operability. The user further implemented changes to use newer IDE APIs and passed API keys as command-line arguments.
android-studioappcodegolandintellij-ideaphpstorm
wakatime/legacy-python-cli
Jul 2013 - May 2021
Command line interface used by all WakaTime text editor plugins.
Role in this project:Backend Developer
Backend DeveloperContributions:75 releases, 983 commits, 16 PRs in 7 years 11 months
Contributions summary:Alan primarily contributed to the core functionality of the WakaTime command-line interface, specifically focusing on the API integration and data handling. They added support for sending heartbeats to the API, including various data points such as file and time, as well as handling the configuration of API keys and proxy settings. The user also implemented features like the offline queue for caching heartbeats and improved the handling of responses and error scenarios from the WakaTime API.
command-line-interfacetext-editorwakatimeanalyticsmetrics
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