Desmond Preston
Sr SWE II at Samsara
Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolDes Preston is a senior software engineer with 12 years of experience building distributed systems and developer tools, currently driving backend work at Samsara from Cambridge, MA. He has a strong track record at companies ranging from Starry and Tanium to early-stage startups like Teller Finance, where he led platform design and security during initial product development. Comfortable across systems, web, and cloud stacks, he’s contributed notable open-source improvements to projects such as GitHub’s official CLI and the popular wtfutil terminal dashboard—adding resilient OAuth handling and new service modules. Des pairs a practical engineering mindset with ongoing study in math, data science, and networking, which informs both architecture and low-level integrations. Colleagues rely on him for reliable, scalable solutions and for translating research curiosities into production-ready systems.
12 years of coding experience
10 years of employment as a software developer
Irondequoit High SchoolBachelor of Science (B.S.), Computer Science, Bachelor of Science (B.S.), Computer Science at SUNY Fredonia
Stackoverflow
11reputation
1kreached
0answers
2questions
Github Skills (21)
github-cli10
back-end-development10
apidoc10
go10
api10
golang10
twitch-api10
command-line-interface9
git9
command-line9
oauth9
githubaction-workflow8
terminal-emulator8
terminal-application8
github-ci8
Programming languages (10)
Github contributions (5)
cli/cli
Jul 2021 - Dec 2022
GitHub’s official command line tool
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:12 reviews, 16 commits, 23 PRs in 1 year 5 months
Contributions summary:Desmond contributed to the core functionality of the `cli/cli` repository, a command-line tool for GitHub. They implemented changes related to GitHub Actions run monitoring, error handling, and release features. These contributions involved modifications to Go code, particularly within the command execution and release management components. Furthermore, the user enhanced the tool with configuration options for features like browser selection and other configuration-related updates.
golangcommand-line-toolgocommand-linecli
wtfutil/wtf
Apr 2022 - May 2022
The personal information dashboard for your terminal
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:5 commits, 2 PRs, 2 comments in 1 month
Contributions summary:Desmond focused on enhancing the Twitch module, specifically addressing OAuth token management for API access and title changes. They updated the module to refresh the OAuth token during each refresh cycle to ensure tokens do not expire, improving the module's resilience. Additionally, the user upgraded the twitch API library to v2. Furthermore, the user added a new Steam status module, including client-side and settings file additions to the project.
golangdevopswtfgowtfutil
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