Michael Lang
Principal Engineer at Recurly
Athens-Clarke County Unified Government, Georgia, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolMichael Lang is a Principal Engineer with 17 years of professional experience who blends deep low-level curiosity—dating back to writing DOS programs that spoke to serial ports—with modern Ruby ecosystem mastery. He has led engineering teams and founded a consulting firm, guiding projects across manufacturing, hospitality, medical research, billing and finance, and currently drives platform and agent work at Recurly after shaping Ruby agent open-source efforts at New Relic. Michael excels at translating business needs into robust, scalable solutions, from gem selection and Rails architecture to automated testing, deployment, and performance tuning. Notably, his open-source contributions to the New Relic Ruby agent include improving environment-variable handling, distributed tracing and W3C trace context compliance—work that strengthens observability in multithreaded systems. Based in Athens, Georgia, he pairs hands-on development with team building and operational rigor rooted in a BS in Information and Computer Science from Georgia Tech.
17 years of coding experience
2 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor of Science (B.S.), Information and Computer Science, Bachelor of Science (B.S.), Information and Computer Science at Georgia Institute of Technology
English
Stackoverflow
1,038reputation
47kreached
28answers
22questions
Github Skills (18)
env10
testing10
distributed-tracing10
environment-variables10
ruby10
mochajs9
rake8
apm-agent8
rubygems7
agent7
jquery-ui6
refinery-cms6
routes6
sprockets6
ruby-on-rails6
Programming languages (17)
Github contributions (5)
newrelic/newrelic-ruby-agent
Dec 2019 - Jul 2020
New Relic RPM Ruby Agent
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer & DevOps Engineer
Back-end Developer & DevOps EngineerContributions:2 releases, 100 reviews, 70 commits in 7 months
Contributions summary:Michael primarily focused on improving the New Relic Ruby agent's internal workings, specifically related to environment variable handling and distributed tracing. They implemented and refined various approaches to correctly update the environment variables, resolving potential issues related to multi-threaded updates. Furthermore, they contributed to meeting W3C trace context specifications, refining header parsing and metric instrumentation. The user also updated dependencies, improved testing, and optimized build processes.
newrelicrubyagentapm-agent
mwlang/rails_wordpress
Apr 2015 - Jul 2017
A Rails Engine that enables you to easily wire up a Rails app to an existing WordPress database
Contributions:32 commits, 3 PRs, 27 pushes in 2 years 3 months
rails-apprails-engineswordpress-database
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