Michael Sawka
Founder CEO at Wave Terminal
San Francisco, California, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolMichael Sawka is a founder and CEO with two decades of hands-on engineering and leadership experience, currently building Wave Terminal—an open-source, cross-platform terminal that blends inline web rendering, persistent sessions, and universal history. A Stanford CS graduate, he’s a Golang hacker and React/TypeScript front-end builder who has led engineering, product, and operations at startups and scaled publishers in the SF Bay Area. As Topix CTO he drove a 10x business transformation using big data, realtime Golang pipelines, ML for revenue prediction, and a migration to modern cloud infrastructure. He combines deep systems-level expertise (custom NoSQL stores, ad-stack optimizations) with product instincts and recruiting/mentorship experience. His open-source work on Wave Terminal includes implementing markdown preview and rich front-end features, reflecting a founder who still ships code. Based in San Francisco, he blends operator discipline with a builder’s curiosity for developer tooling and workflow reinvention.
5 years of coding experience
22 years of employment as a software developer
BS Computer Science, BS Computer Science at Stanford University
Github Skills (14)
component-development10
css10
markdown10
lessc10
markdown-it10
frontend10
web-components10
parsing10
front-end-development10
parse10
react10
javascript9
developer-tools7
command-line7
Programming languages (5)
Github contributions (5)
wavetermdev/waveterm
Nov 2023 - Mar 2025
An open-source, cross-platform terminal for seamless workflows
Role in this project:
Front-end Developer
Front-end DeveloperContributions:14 releases, 74 reviews, 945 PRs in 1 year 4 months
Contributions summary:Michael's primary contributions focus on front-end development, specifically implementing features related to markdown preview functionality. They implemented a new markdown preview feature, styling the markdown elements with custom CSS, and integrating a Markdown parser to display formatted text. The code changes indicate an understanding of React, CSS/Less, and front-end component development within the context of a terminal application.
command-linedeveloper-toolslinuxmacosproductivity
sawka/dashborg-python-sdk
Feb 2021 - Oct 2021
Contributions:8 releases, 49 commits, 33 pushes in 9 months
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