Alan Hamlett
Lead Software Engineer at WakaTime
Vienna, 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
Github Skills (46)
asynchronous10
apim10
json10
python10
apidoc10
back-end-development10
async10
wtforms10
vimscript10
testing10
validations10
user-authentication10
authentication10
travis-ci10
vscode-extension10
Programming languages (32)
Github contributions (5)
wakatime/vim-wakatime
Jun 2013 - Jan 2023
Vim plugin for automatic time tracking and metrics generated from your programming activity.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:13 releases, 36 reviews, 528 commits in 9 years 8 months
Contributions summary:Alan contributed to the development and maintenance of a Vim plugin for automatic time tracking. They focused on implementing and refining the core API interaction logic, including sending heartbeats and handling offline activity. The user also made improvements to dependency detection and ensured the code was compatible with various Python versions and operating systems, and they also worked on bug fixes related to issues with edge cases and improving performance by buffering heartbeats and using async features in Vim.
vim-pluginsvimvim-plugintime-trackingtracking
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.
pythoncommand-line-interfacehandwritingcommand-linetext-editor
Find and Hire Top DevelopersWe’ve analyzed the programming source code of over 60 million software developers on GitHub and scored them by 50,000 skills. Sign-up on Prog,AI to search for software developers.