Andrew Plaza
Staff Software Engineer at XMTP Labs
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolAndrew Plaza is a Staff Software Engineer with 11 years of experience building robust backend systems, currently focused on chat and protocol work at XMTP Labs. He specializes in Rust and distributed systems, with notable open-source contributions to Diesel (extending ORM extensibility) and Parity's Substrate (core blockchain infrastructure and tracing). His background includes building parachain tooling at Enjin and creating archival tooling at Parity, demonstrating deep familiarity with blockchain clients, WASM, and database internals. Andrew pairs systems-level thinking with practical SDK and protocol development, having shipped libxmtp and low-level primitives for scalable NFTs. He also founded HackScranton, showing a long-standing commitment to community-building and developer education beyond his engineering role. Based in Philadelphia, he casually admits “sometimes I throw code at other people,” signaling a hands-on, collaborative engineering style.
11 years of coding experience
9 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor of Science - BS Computer Science, Bachelor of Science - BS Computer Science at University of ScrantonHigh School Diploma, High School Diploma at West Morris Central High School
English, Polish, rust
Stackoverflow
101reputation
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Github Skills (27)
substrate10
query-builder10
back-end-development10
clientside10
system-design10
rust-wasm10
wasm-pack10
polkadot-js10
orm10
blockchain10
webclient10
nodejs10
rust10
polkadot10
nodes10
Programming languages (23)
Github contributions (5)
diesel-rs/diesel
Sep 2019 - Jan 2025
A safe, extensible ORM and Query Builder for Rust
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:3 reviews, 3 PRs, 7 comments in 5 years 4 months
Contributions summary:Andrew primarily focused on enhancing the extensibility of the Diesel ORM for third-party backends. They made several key modifications, including making `DynInstrumentation`, `skip_from`, `InsertOrIgnore`, `Replace`, and items within `combination_clause` public. These changes appear to facilitate the integration of Diesel with alternative database systems. Additionally, the user fixed compilation tests related to their modifications.
querymysqlrustsqlbuilder
paritytech/substrate
May 2020 - Nov 2020
Substrate: The platform for blockchain innovators
Role in this project:Backend Developer
Backend DeveloperContributions:25 reviews, 5 commits, 6 PRs in 6 months
Contributions summary:Andrew contributed to the Substrate blockchain platform by focusing on core infrastructure and client-side logic. Their commits include bumping versions of database dependencies, which suggests an understanding of the project's internal workings. Further contributions involved implementing WASM local-blob overrides, adding new modules, CLI options and modifying existing code for enhanced functionality. They also modified the client and executor to allow for nested spans and other tracing changes.
substraterustblockchainparitypolkadot
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