MichaelĀ Niksa
Senior Software Engineer at Microsoft
Redmond, Washington, United States
Summary
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Michael Niksa is a Senior Software Engineer with a decade of experience modernizing Windows developer tooling and platforms at Microsoft, currently focused on engineering systems to accelerate other teams' productivity. He helped bring the Windows Terminal and Console Host into the open-source era, delivering features like Unicode support, tabs, and modern terminal customization while contributing C# improvements to the widely used microsoft/terminal repo. Comfortable across OS internals, developer tools, and back-end systems, he has a track record of driving cross-team modernization efforts and shipping practical improvements for developers. His background spans application compatibility, phone SDK tooling, and systems administration, giving him a rare blend of low-level troubleshooting and developer-experience design. Based in Redmond, he pairs deep technical expertise with a pragmatic focus on enabling engineering velocity at scale. An often-overlooked strength is his history of building diagnostics and automation tools that quietly reduce triage time and accelerate shipping.
10 years of coding experience
15 years of employment as a software developer
Associate, IT Information Security Specialist, Associate, IT Information Security Specialist at Milwaukee Area Technical CollegeCulture and Societies, Culture and Societies at Eastern Washington UniversityCalculus & Differential Equations, Calculus & Differential Equations at Concordia University-WisconsinBachelor, Computer Engineering, Bachelor, Computer Engineering at Purdue University
English, Spanish, Japanese
Stackoverflow
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Github Skills (6)
csharp10
dotnet-core10
utility9
utilities9
windows9
develop8
Programming languages (13)
Github contributions (5)
microsoft/terminal
Aug 2017 - Apr 2022
The new Windows Terminal and the original Windows console host, all in the same place!
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:6 releases, 1184 reviews, 574 commits in 4 years 9 months
Contributions summary:Michael contributed to the `microsoft/terminal` repository by implementing features within the `ColorTool` utility, which is used for customizing the terminal's color schemes. Their contributions included fixing typos, merging pull requests, and adding new features like exporting the current color scheme to an INI file. The commits indicate the user's familiarity with C# and working within a Windows development environment.
windowswindows-consolewindows-terminalconsoleterminal
MicrosoftDocs/Console-Docs
Sep 2016 - Aug 2022
Windows Console Docs Repo
Contributions:69 reviews, 223 commits, 119 PRs in 6 years
windows-console
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