Chris Dickinson
Senior Staff Backend Engineer at Machinify
Portland, Oregon, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolChris Dickinson is a Senior Staff Backend Engineer in Portland with 17 years of experience building scalable, pragmatic systems and removing the friction that slows teams down. He blends deep backend systems work—in Rust, Node, and Postgres—with frontend polish, contributing to high-profile open source like Node.js and Read the Docs and authoring git-rs and Entropic core pieces. Chris has led platform and registry designs at scale (npm registry, a Wasm/MCP registry, and deployment systems) that improved reliability, deploy time, and cost while enabling team autonomy. He favors automation, safety (canary releases, infra-as-code), and observability, and quietly elevates teams through mentorship and shared ownership. An entropy enthusiast by GitHub bio, he often dives into low-level storage, caching, and packfile indexing work that’s easy to miss but crucial to system performance. His BA in East Asian Languages and Culture underscores a wide curiosity that he channels into cross-disciplinary technical leadership.
17 years of coding experience
16 years of employment as a software developer
University of Kansas
Github Skills (39)
caching10
javascript10
postgresql10
runtimes10
user-interface10
data-structure10
stream10
dns10
fileio10
xss10
file-handling10
file-processing10
data-structures10
nodejs10
rust10
Programming languages (20)
Github contributions (5)
chrisdickinson/git-rs
Nov 2017 - May 2022
git, implemented in rust, for fun and education :crab:
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:120 commits, 3 PRs, 64 pushes in 4 years 5 months
Contributions summary:Chris implemented a Git-like system in Rust, focusing on core object storage and packfile indexing. They started with an initial commit and then added fundamental components such as an `Id` structure with parsing capabilities. They also implemented read operations for commits, trees, and blobs, as well as developed packfile indexing, laying the groundwork for efficient object retrieval in a Git-like system. Subsequent commits expanded the packfile implementation, added delta encoding/decoding, and started an API for walking the commit graph.
rustcrablibgit2for-fungit-gui
entropic-dev/entropic
Apr 2019 - Jul 2019
🦝 :package: a package registry for anything, but mostly javascript 🦝 🦝 🦝
Role in this project:Backend Developer
Backend DeveloperContributions:52 commits, 51 PRs, 61 pushes in 2 months
Contributions summary:Chris primarily contributed to the backend infrastructure of the `entropic-dev/entropic` package registry. They implemented middleware components for request logging, request ID generation, and transaction management within a PostgreSQL database. Their work involved the creation and modification of handlers, models, and utilities, with a focus on integrating with a PostgreSQL database and object storage to support package publishing and retrieval. The user also refactored and streamlined the routing mechanisms.
javascriptpackage-registrynodejsnpm
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