Matthew Thalman
Principal Software Engineer at Microsoft
Eden Prairie, Minnesota, United States
Summary
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Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolMatthew Thalman is a Principal Software Engineer at Microsoft with over two decades building developer-facing platforms across .NET, Visual Studio, and Dynamics. He currently leads .NET's Linux source-build and release infrastructure that powers distro packages for Red Hat, Canonical, Debian, Alpine, and Azure Linux—meaning if you installed .NET from a Linux package manager, you likely used pipelines his team ships. Known for pioneering distroless .NET images, driving .NET 10 to a zero-prebuilt source-build milestone, and designing always-on dependency rebuilds, he blends deep release engineering, container/OCI, and supply-chain security expertise. Lately he has been productizing agentic AI workflows and built a full-stack agentic assistant on .NET + React + Azure OpenAI, bringing AI into PR review, release, and security triage. An active open-source maintainer and automation engineer on the dotnet monorepo and dotnet-docker projects, he focuses on durable, testable pipelines and bootstrap flows that keep large-scale builds reliable. Based in Eden Prairie, MN, he pairs systems-level engineering with practical innovations that reduce image size, increase security, and accelerate distro adoption.
10 years of coding experience
23 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor of Science (BS), Computer Science, Bachelor of Science (BS), Computer Science at North Dakota State University
Stackoverflow
3,680reputation
199kreached
128answers
3questions
docker
top-5%
azure
top-5%
Github Skills (42)
git10
docker10
bootstrap10
net10
css10
dotnet10
bash10
asp-net-core10
dockers10
cicd10
asp-net10
azure-service-fabric10
automation10
script10
build-automation10
Programming languages (21)
Github contributions (5)
dotnet/dotnet-docker
Mar 2019 - Jan 2023
Official container images for .NET
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer & DevOps Engineer
Back-end Developer & DevOps EngineerContributions:1564 reviews, 1368 commits, 2855 PRs in 3 years 11 months
Contributions summary:Matthew contributed to the .NET Docker project by focusing on improvements to testing, pipeline logic, and infrastructure files. They added exit codes to error messages for Docker commands in tests, implemented a refactor of the pipeline logic, and modified scripts related to generating image names and setting variables. These changes indicate a focus on improving the testing framework, ensuring pipeline stability, and maintainability within the project.
container-imagedotnet
microsoft/dotnet-framework-docker
Mar 2019 - Jan 2023
The repo for the official docker images for .NET Framework on Windows Server Core.
Role in this project:Front-end Developer
Front-end DeveloperContributions:189 reviews, 229 commits, 580 PRs in 3 years 10 months
Contributions summary:Matthew's commits primarily focus on updating the `bootstrap-theme.css` file, indicating work related to the styling and user interface of the application. They also updated the .NET framework version to 4.8 and updated the samples to use 4.8. This suggests a focus on improving the visual appearance and compatibility of the project. Further contributions include refactoring the pipeline for PR builds and integrating common engineering infrastructure.
docker-imagedotnetwindowswindows-server
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