Drew Noakes
Principal Software Engineer at Microsoft
Melbourne, Victoria, Australia
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolDrew Noakes is a Principal Software Engineer based in Melbourne with 24 years of experience building high-performance, concurrent and distributed systems across developer tooling, capital markets, energy and telecoms. At Microsoft he has driven build acceleration, IDE performance and developer tooling improvements for .NET, and his open-source contributions include impactful fixes and performance work in high-profile repos like NuGet, MSBuild, clrmd and Roslyn analyzers. Equally comfortable in C#, C++, Java, Clojure and JavaScript, he combines deep systems craft—memory and allocation optimization, multithreading and real-time processing—with pragmatic UI and tooling design. He has a track record of shipping production-critical trading systems and robotics code (including a RoboCup runner-up humanoid team), showing a rare blend of low-latency engineering and applied research. Colleagues rely on him for thoughtful, maintainable refactors that measurably improve performance and developer experience.
24 years of coding experience
19 years of employment as a software developer
Kingswood CollegeBachelor of Applied Science Computing and Scientific Instrumentation, Bachelor of Applied Science Computing and Scientific Instrumentation at Swinburne University of TechnologyVCE Computer Science Physics Mathematics, VCE Computer Science Physics Mathematics at Melbourne High School
English, Korean
Stackoverflow
305,903reputation
41.2mreached
1,181answers
311questions
dynamic
top-1%
canvas
top-1%
styles
top-5%
flags
top-5%
regex
top-5%
localization
top-5%
Github Skills (200)
nuget10
datetime10
transaction10
dashboard10
postgresql10
package-management10
xaml10
multithreading10
echo10
testing10
bash10
websocket10
text-formatting10
intellij-idea10
databinding10
Programming languages (25)
Github contributions (5)
gitextensions/gitextensions
Mar 2015 - Jan 2023
Git Extensions is a standalone UI tool for managing git repositories. It also integrates with Windows Explorer and Microsoft Visual Studio (2015/2017/2019).
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:190 reviews, 1650 commits, 308 PRs in 7 years 11 months
Contributions summary:Drew's contributions primarily focused on refactoring and optimizing the codebase of the Git Extensions UI tool. The commits demonstrate expertise in C# by converting methods to local functions, reordering members, and addressing potential null reference exceptions. They also introduced enhancements like a mechanism to handle code in a more modular structure, and added visual adjustments like padding, which is consistent with general UI design.
repositoriesmicrosoft-visual-studiowindowsgit-clientgitextensions
drewnoakes/metadata-extractor
May 2002 - Nov 2022
Extracts Exif, IPTC, XMP, ICC and other metadata from image, video and audio files
Role in this project:Backend Developer & Test Automation Engineer
Backend Developer & Test Automation EngineerContributions:17 releases, 38 reviews, 1163 commits in 20 years 10 months
Contributions summary:Drew primarily worked on extracting metadata from various file types, particularly Exif, IPTC, and camera-specific makernote data. They added support for various cameras, including Ricoh and Sony models. The contributions involved implementing new tag decoding methods, and extensive testing with image files. The user refactored and restructured existing code to improve maintainability and prevent potential bugs.
quicktimemetadataepsvideojpeg
Find and Hire Top DevelopersWe’ve analyzed the programming source code of over 60 million software developers on GitHub and scored them by 50,000 skills. Sign-up on Prog,AI to search for software developers.