Jeff Widman
Software Engineer at GitHub
Bellingham, Washington, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolJeff Widman is a pragmatic software engineer and two-time founder with 12+ years building scalable distributed systems and shipping developer tools; he currently helps keep the world’s software up to date as a Dependabot engineer at GitHub. He blends hands-on Go and Python backend work with product-minded automation and devops, having led Kafka platform strategy, performance tuning, and large-scale rebuilds at Netskope. An active open-source maintainer and technical writer, Jeff holds commit access to widely used projects (including kafka-python, Flask-adjacent repos, and Dependabot Core) and has quietly driven upgrades, refactors, and documentation fixes across major ecosystems. His background in marketing and startups (two acquisitions) gives him a rare ability to grow technical communities and convert drive-by contributors into regular maintainers. Outside of code he’s an endurance outdoorsman and family-focused Christian who brings the same persistence to scaling systems as to a 100-mile bike ride or 50-mile day hike.
11 years of coding experience
7 years of employment as a software developer
Y CombinatorBA Economics, BA Economics at Western Washington UniversityAA Graduated with Honors from the Honors Program, AA Graduated with Honors from the Honors Program at Whatcom Community College
Stackoverflow
22,674reputation
2.5mreached
41answers
55questions
ansible
top-5%
mongodb
top-5%
postgresql
top-5%
python
top-1%
firefox
top-5%
mongoose
top-5%
Github Skills (64)
visual-studio-code10
go-modules10
debugging10
debug10
apache-zookeeper10
pytest10
admin10
back-end-development10
python10
uwsgi10
technical-writing10
testing10
flask-sqlalchemy10
kafka10
zookeeper10
Programming languages (31)
Github contributions (5)
pallets-eco/flask-debugtoolbar
Feb 2017 - Jan 2023
A toolbar overlay for debugging Flask applications
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:7 releases, 46 reviews, 36 commits in 6 years
Contributions summary:Jeff primarily contributed to maintaining and improving the Flask-DebugToolbar project, focusing on documentation, dependencies, and code quality. Their work involved updating documentation links, fixing import issues, and refactoring code for improved readability. Furthermore, the user addressed deprecation warnings and updated the project to use Flask's native CLI, enhancing the project's maintainability and aligning it with best practices. They also bumped the project's version and updated PyPI metadata files.
pythontoolbarflaskflask-debugtoolbaroverlay
smurfix/flask-script
Dec 2015 - Sep 2016
Flask extension to help writing external scripts for Flask applications
Role in this project:Backend Developer
Backend DeveloperContributions:17 commits, 12 PRs, 17 pushes in 9 months
Contributions summary:Jeff primarily contributed to the maintenance and improvement of the Flask-Script library. They fixed a compatibility issue by removing support for an older version of iPython. They updated the project's PyPI classifiers to reflect current Python versions and fixed a pytest warning to improve the testing workflow. The user also updated the project's documentation and added badges.
pythonjinja2external-scriptsflaskpython-script
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