Michael Smith
Principal Engineer at Cloudera
Portland, Oregon, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolMichael Smith is a Principal Engineer based in Portland, Oregon with 11 years of experience building and optimizing large-scale distributed systems, compilers, and performance-critical native code. He combines deep systems expertise in C/C++, VHDL-AMS and LLVM-based code generation with modern backend work in Clojure and Go, currently shaping distributed communication tooling and on-prem Kubernetes delivery systems. At Puppet he led scalability improvements that pushed the Puppet Communication Protocol toward multi-million client designs and helped evolve Bolt into a widely used DevOps orchestration tool. His open-source contributions span infrastructure projects like Apache Impala and kots, where he improved debugging, CLI ergonomics and container efficiency, and long-term maintenance of legacy tools such as Marionette Collective. Known for squeezing memory and performance out of complex systems, he also brings an unusual mix of hardware modeling and theater-production experience that surfaces in pragmatic leadership and clear communication across teams.
11 years of coding experience
19 years of employment as a software developer
BS Physics Computer Science, BS Physics Computer Science at University of OregonExtended Study Numerical Methods, Extended Study Numerical Methods at University of California, BerkeleyExtended Study Machine Learning, Extended Study Machine Learning at Portland State University
Stackoverflow
11reputation
250reached
0answers
1question
Github Skills (43)
debugging10
kubernetes10
debug10
puppeteer10
c-language10
puppet10
scripting10
testing10
versioninfo10
packaging10
configuration-management10
software-update10
cicd10
ruby10
release-management10
Programming languages (26)
Github contributions (5)
puppetlabs/puppetlabs-puppet_agent
Jun 2016 - Mar 2020
Module for managing Puppet-Agent
Role in this project:
DevOps Engineer
DevOps EngineerContributions:108 commits, 196 PRs, 108 pushes in 3 years 10 months
Contributions summary:Michael primarily focused on maintaining and improving the CI/CD pipeline and testing infrastructure for the Puppet Agent module. They fixed issues related to Continuous Integration (CI), ensuring the tests used valid certificate names and correcting host IP resolution. They also addressed linting issues and refactored the build configuration, which involved adapting to changes in puppet-rspec and utilizing the PUPPET_GEM_VERSION. Finally, the user resolved issues related to Windows acceptance testing, and improved testing procedures.
puppet-agentsupportedagentpuppet
puppetlabs/bolt
Sep 2017 - Mar 2022
Bolt is an open source orchestration tool that automates the manual work it takes to maintain your infrastructure on an as-needed basis or as part of a greater orchestration workflow. It can be installed on your local workstation and connects directly to remote nodes with SSH or WinRM, so you are not required to install any agent software.
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:728 commits, 523 PRs, 259 pushes in 4 years 6 months
Contributions summary:Michael focused on implementing features related to SSH and pseudo-TTY support. They added and modified code related to the `--tty` flag for enabling/disabling pseudo-TTY over SSH and made the sudo password optional. The user also reworked spec tests and added tests related to running tasks. Furthermore, the user implemented features related to handling file uploads and general improvements for the shell system and testing.
workstationautomatessshbasistakes
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