Alex Schmitt
Senior Staff Software Engineer at Zendesk
San Carlos, California, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolAlex Schmitt is a Senior Staff Software Engineer with 11 years of experience building and improving backend systems, currently leading technical efforts at Zendesk from Paso Robles, California. He brings deep Rails expertise—evident from contributions to the popular RailsAdmin project—and systems-level experience enhancing build tooling, having improved target filtering in the Pants build system. Alex pairs hands-on bug fixes and refactors with cross-functional leadership, previously driving search, React migrations, infrastructure upgrades, and GDPR work at NationBuilder. His background spans product-facing engineering, developer tooling, and operational projects, and he’s known for a pragmatic learn-do-repeat approach that surfaces subtle UX and data-layer improvements.
11 years of coding experience
12 years of employment as a software developer
Master of Arts (M.A.), International Relations and Affairs, Master of Arts (M.A.), International Relations and Affairs at American University of ParisModesto High SchoolBachelor of Arts (B.A.), Global Cultures; Criminology, Law and Society, Bachelor of Arts (B.A.), Global Cultures; Criminology, Law and Society at University of California, Irvine
English, French, Spanish
Github Skills (14)
activerecord10
ruby-rails10
build-tools10
rails10
build-system10
python10
ruby10
mysql9
jruby8
html7
javascript7
javas4
java4
scala4
Programming languages (8)
Github contributions (5)
railsadminteam/rails_admin
Oct 2020 - Oct 2022
RailsAdmin is a Rails engine that provides an easy-to-use interface for managing your data
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:38 reviews, 40 commits, 32 PRs in 2 years
Contributions summary:Alex primarily contributed to the RailsAdmin engine, addressing issues related to database interactions and user interface elements. They fixed a bug in the export feature for MySQL databases and implemented changes to hide unnecessary filter options for required fields. The user also addressed a JRuby CI failure and made various improvements to the application's form and view components. These modifications demonstrate the user's expertise in database interactions, form rendering, and general Rails application development.
railsrails-enginerailsadminrubyactivemodel
pantsbuild/pants
Feb 2019 - Feb 2020
The Pants Build System
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:24 commits, 23 PRs, 57 comments in 11 months
Contributions summary:Alex's contributions focused on enhancing the Pants Build System's target filtering capabilities. They implemented a subsystem for excluding targets based on tags, adding options to configure these exclusions. Further work involved refactoring the `TargetFiltering` class to improve how filtering criteria are applied. The user also introduced a mechanism for tasks to opt-in to the new target filtering behavior and added a subsystem for appending tags to targets from a single source.
pythonprotobufaws-lambdapantsshell
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