John Smart
Hardware Engineer at AStA Uni Hamburg
Hamburg, Germany
Summary
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RockstarJohn Smart is a Hamburg-based hardware engineer with 12 years of experience who blends physics-trained analytical thinking with hands-on software development and data science skills. At AStA Uni Hamburg he works on hardware systems while contributing extensively to open-source projects, notably improving workflows and user features in widely used tools like the i3 tiling window manager and the cmus console music player. His contributions range from adding new commands and UI refinements to automating release/versioning processes and optimizing low-level resizing logic, showing fluency across backend, system, and build engineering. Comfortable in both embedded/hardware contexts and Unix toolchains, he brings a pragmatic focus on reliability, maintainability, and developer ergonomics. Colleagues rely on him to bridge hardware constraints with software solutions, often surfacing subtle improvements that reduce operational friction.
12 years of coding experience
Github Skills (14)
c1710
command-line-interface10
x1110
i3-config10
c1110
i310
cli10
command-line10
makefile9
bash9
mpi8
git8
bsd5
linux5
Programming languages (10)
Github contributions (5)
i3/i3
Feb 2015 - Oct 2019
A tiling window manager for X11
Role in this project:
Backend & System Engineer
Backend & System EngineerContributions:12 PRs, 70 comments, 3 issues in 4 years 9 months
Contributions summary:John contributed to the i3 tiling window manager by implementing new functionality, fixing bugs, and improving build processes. They added a "toggle" option to the `split` command and corrected an issue related to line continuations in comments. The user also automated the creation of version files for releases and optimized the code related to resizing tiling windows. Further, they modified the program to restart the bar status command upon a configuration update.
x11linuxtiling-window-managerwindowbsd
cmus/cmus
Mar 2016 - Feb 2019
Small, fast and powerful console music player for Unix-like operating systems.
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:15 commits, 9 PRs, 45 comments in 2 years 11 months
Contributions summary:John primarily contributed to enhancing the functionality of the console music player. They implemented a new command "pause-playback" and integrated it with the existing player controls by adding new options, commands, and functions in the core files. Furthermore, the user refactored the search commands for backward search and added a configuration option for the album color within the track display. The user also exposed the stream information via MPRIS when a stream is playing.
unixoperating-systemsconsolemidilinux
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