Michael Smith
Principal Engineer at Open Core EMR
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States
Summary
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Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolMichael Smith is a Principal Engineer with 15 years of experience designing secure, usable web systems and improving developer workflows in regulated environments. He combines product-driven decision making, web standards and accessibility expertise, and hands-on backend/DevOps skills—especially Python, Docker, and automation—to deliver reliable, compliant platforms. His open-source contributions include meaningful fixes and AWS KMS integration work in SaltStack and modernization of the Python Avro library, reflecting a focus on secure secrets handling and data serialization. Having led teams and technical strategy across healthcare and enterprise software at Syapse, PHC Global, and Open Core EMR, he excels at translating complex requirements into auditable engineering solutions. Based in Philadelphia with an MBA/MS-MIS and a physics background, he brings both analytical rigor and practical ops experience to system architecture and product selection.
15 years of coding experience
22 years of employment as a software developer
BS Physics, BS Physics at University of PittsburghMBA MS-MIS Business Information Systems, MBA MS-MIS Business Information Systems at University of Pittsburgh Katz Graduate School of Business
English
Stackoverflow
75,635reputation
9.9mreached
992answers
122questions
mysql
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environment-variables
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unix
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Github Skills (59)
avro10
boto10
python10
configuration-management10
linux10
bash10
data-serialization10
cloud-infrastructure10
schema-design10
environment-variables10
serialization10
php10
infrastructure10
saltstack10
aws10
Programming languages (23)
Github contributions (5)
apache/avro
Nov 2018 - Jan 2022
Apache Avro is a data serialization system.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:114 reviews, 123 commits, 235 PRs in 3 years 3 months
Contributions summary:Michael primarily worked on the Python implementation of Apache Avro. Their commits focused on refactoring and improving the code, specifically by updating and modernizing setup scripts, refactoring the `validate` function, and enhancing the parsing capabilities. They also introduced support for new logical types, like date, time, and timestamp, and addressed various issues to improve performance and reliability. The contributions show significant focus on improving the core library and adding new features.
avrobigdatadotnetpythonrust
saltstack/salt
Nov 2016 - Oct 2018
Software to automate the management and configuration of infrastructure and applications at scale.
Role in this project:Back-end & DevOps Engineer
Back-end & DevOps EngineerContributions:9 commits, 4 PRs, 34 comments in 1 year 11 months
Contributions summary:Michael contributed to the SaltStack project by addressing a bug in the `gpg` state, ensuring correct behavior when adding or deleting keys. They added a KMS Envelope-Encryption renderer, enabling secure handling of secrets through AWS KMS. Further work involved refactoring for AWS profile support and addressing Py3 bytestring errors, improving the functionality and robustness of the AWS KMS integration.
pythonzeromqevent-streaminfrastructure-managementcloud-providers
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