Jeff Blaisdell
Principal Software Engineer at SmartThings
Saint Paul, Minnesota, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolJeff Blaisdell is a Principal Software Engineer with 13 years of experience, currently leading scalability and reliability efforts for SmartThings’ global IoT event pipeline. He specializes in backend systems, event-driven architectures, and high-concurrency SSE connectivity, having tuned systems from 100k to over 3 million concurrent connections and replaced legacy pipelines with Ratpack, Kafka, and distributed caching solutions. Jeff combines hands-on coding (Java, Ratpack, Spring, Groovy) with operational savvy—building sidecars in Go for custom metrics and designing connection-draining strategies to avoid deployment thundering herds. He has moved SmartThings’ integrations from monolith to distributed platforms supporting tens of millions of installations and collaborates with major partners such as Samsung, Google, Amazon, Mercedes, and Ford. An active open-source contributor, he’s patched core Ratpack components to improve authentication and metrics visibility, reflecting a practical focus on observability and performant HTTP behavior. Based in Saint Paul, MN, he pairs technical leadership with a track record of measurable impact in production systems.
13 years of coding experience
15 years of employment as a software developer
B.A., M.I.S. and Business Management, B.A., M.I.S. and Business Management at Luther CollegeMBA, Information Technology, MBA, Information Technology at Globe University
Github Skills (10)
javas10
http-client10
groovy10
java10
metric10
testing9
apidoc9
user-authentication9
api9
authentication9
Programming languages (6)
Github contributions (5)
ratpack/ratpack
Jan 2015 - Apr 2018
Lean & powerful HTTP apps
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:6 commits, 5 PRs, 18 comments in 3 years 3 months
Contributions summary:Jeff contributed to the Ratpack project by addressing issues related to authentication, metrics, and HTTP client functionality. Their work includes implementing checks for AJAX requests in authentication handlers, fixing truncation errors in metrics related to request time measurements, and exposing metrics for the HTTP client. These changes involved modifications across core components and testing files, ensuring improved performance monitoring and API behavior.
SmartThingsOSS/ratpack-kafka
Jul 2016 - Apr 2020
Contributions:9 commits, 11 PRs, 5 pushes in 3 years 9 months
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