Alexander Smith
Student At Large at Home Sabbatical
Ottawa, Ontario, Canada
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolAlexander Smith is a veteran software engineer with over three decades of hands-on experience shipping games, low-level systems, and tooling, currently pursuing research and development as a self-directed "Student at Large" in Ottawa. His career spans gritty platform-specific 3D and Z80 work to mid-level networking and rules engines for multiplayer titles, and higher-level automation for DVD authoring using MySQL, PHP and custom tools. Lately he contributes to the Haiku operating system kernel and utilities, applying system-architecture insight to bug fixes, refactors, and package-management enhancements. He’s exploring file-system research and practical contributions to Haiku while prototyping a “less evil” reputation system in Ruby on Rails, combining academic thinking with pragmatic implementation. Known for preferring to delete and simplify code rather than add more, he brings a strong sensibility for maintainability and understanding legacy code. That blend of game-dev creativity, low-level systems expertise, and curiosity about classification and reputation systems makes him unusually versatile.
11 years of coding experience
16 years of employment as a software developer
MCS, MCS at Carleton UniversityBM, BM at University of Waterloo
Github Skills (11)
debugging10
c-language10
cprogramming-language10
system-programming10
package-management10
haiku10
operating-system10
makefile9
filesystem9
low-level-programming8
api-design8
Programming languages (6)
Github contributions (5)
haiku/haiku
May 2015 - Feb 2022
The Haiku operating system. (Pull requests will be ignored; patches may be sent to https://review.haiku-os.org).
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer & System Architect
Back-end Developer & System ArchitectContributions:17 commits in 6 years 10 months
Contributions summary:Alexander primarily contributes to the Haiku operating system kernel and utilities, focusing on low-level system programming tasks. Their work involves fixing bugs in core system components such as the message system and mail utilities, enhancing the functionality and stability of these critical aspects of the OS. Furthermore, the user addresses issues in the package kit by introducing features like pre-uninstall scripts and improving package management, reflecting architectural knowledge of system components and their interdependencies. The user's contributions also extend to refactoring and optimizing existing code, improving the overall quality and maintainability of the codebase.
operating-systembeoshaiku
agmsmith/RatingStone
Oct 2019 - Jul 2024
An experimental social media web site using a less evil reputation system with forgiveness. Based on RailsTutorial for Rails 6.
Contributions:7 PRs, 552 pushes, 4 branches in 4 years 9 months
railsrails-tutorial
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