John Szakmeister
Maryland, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolJohn Szakmeister is a seasoned software engineer with 22 years of experience specializing in low-level systems, compilers, operating systems, and embedded development. He co-founded and led engineering at Intelesys and later served as Senior VP at Polaris Alpha, bringing both hands-on coding and technical leadership to long-term projects. An active open-source contributor, his work touches notable projects like Neovim, pyGit2, Nose, and Apache Subversion—improving build systems, testing infrastructure, and Git bindings. With an MSEE from Johns Hopkins and deep C/C++ and Python expertise, he excels at cross-domain problem solving, from kernel-level work to distributed testing and tool development. Based in Maryland and not seeking relocation, he prefers roles that focus on compiler, OS, or embedded systems engineering.
22 years of coding experience
18 years of employment as a software developer
BSEE, Electrical Engineering, BSEE, Electrical Engineering at The University of AkronJohns Hopkins University
Stackoverflow
45,781reputation
4.1mreached
389answers
1question
version-control
top-5%
bash
top-5%
git
top-1%
alias
top-5%
github
top-1%
macos
top-5%
Github Skills (42)
unit-testing10
git10
libgit210
github10
python10
scripting10
testing10
bash10
cmake10
travis-ci10
xunit10
neovim10
libgit2sharp10
script10
subversion10
Programming languages (20)
Github contributions (5)
nose-devs/nose
Sep 2012 - Mar 2016
nose is nicer testing for python
Role in this project:
QA Engineer / Test Automation Engineer
QA Engineer / Test Automation EngineerContributions:203 commits, 37 PRs, 37 pushes in 3 years 5 months
Contributions summary:John primarily focused on enhancing the testing infrastructure for the `nose` project. Their contributions include adding and modifying test cases, fixing issues related to Unicode handling and exception reporting within the xUnit plugin, and improving the reliability of existing functional tests. The user addressed issues concerning test execution, ensuring the correct behavior of the test framework. They also implemented improvements to the xUnit test reporting, including capturing stdout and stderr, and handling edge cases.
testingpythonnose
neovim/neovim
Apr 2015 - Sep 2019
Vim-fork focused on extensibility and usability
Role in this project:DevOps Engineer & System Architect
DevOps Engineer & System ArchitectContributions:50 commits, 104 PRs, 43 pushes in 4 years 6 months
Contributions summary:John made significant contributions to the build system and infrastructure of the Neovim project. Their work involved revamping the build system to improve portability and incorporate CMake, as well as integrating dependencies via pkg-config. They also addressed issues related to build environments like Travis CI, including adapting the build process for clang and handling dependency issues related to libuv. Furthermore, they modified testing and localization pipelines to streamline the development workflow.
usabilityapiluavimvim-plugin
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