Michael Kistler
Principal Program Manager at OpenAPI Initiative
Austin, Texas, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolMichael Kistler is a Principal Program Manager on Microsoft's .NET Platform team with decades of engineering and developer-experience leadership spanning IBM and Azure SDK work. He focuses on tooling that makes developers more productive—building SDK generators, API docs, CLIs, Terraform and Crossplane providers—and has contributed backend work to microsoft/typespec including an OpenAPI 3 emitter with thorough unit tests. Based in Austin, he brings a rare blend of deep technical craftsmanship and product leadership, informed by advanced CS study and an MBA. As an OpenAPI Initiative Technical Steering Committee member, he helps shape API standards while continuing to ship pragmatic developer tooling at scale.
4 years of coding experience
27 years of employment as a software developer
ABD, PhD program in Computer Science, ABD, PhD program in Computer Science at The University of Texas at AustinBA, Math & Computer Science, BA, Math & Computer Science at Susquehanna UniversityMS, Computer Science, MS, Computer Science at Syracuse UniversityMBA, Business Administration and Management, General, MBA, Business Administration and Management, General at NYU Stern School of Business
Github Skills (10)
api-rest10
rest-api10
openapi10
json-schema10
api-design10
restful-api10
programming-language9
unit-testing9
protobuf7
protobuffer7
Programming languages (14)
Github contributions (5)
microsoft/typespec
Aug 2021 - Jan 2023
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer & API Developer
Back-end Developer & API DeveloperContributions:85 reviews, 60 commits, 67 PRs in 1 year 5 months
Contributions summary:Michael primarily contributed to the development of an OpenAPI 3 emitter for the `typespec` repository. Their work involved implementing features for generating OpenAPI specifications, including support for response headers, primitive types, and discriminated unions. They also fixed bugs related to parameter handling, enum definitions, and response body generation. Furthermore, the user added unit tests to validate the functionality of the OpenAPI emitter, demonstrating a focus on code quality and testing.
json-schemaopenapi3protobuftypespec
Azure/azure-api-style-guide
Jul 2022 - Jan 2023
Spectral rules to check conformance to Azure API Guidelines
Contributions:36 reviews, 28 commits, 172 PRs in 7 months
apiapi-guidelinesconformanceazure-apiguidelines
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