Michael Ward
Owner at Manchester Chalmers
Evergreen Park, Illinois, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolMichael Ward is an owner and senior software engineer with 11 years of experience building financial systems, algorithmic trading tools, and APIs, currently running Manchester Chalmers where he focuses on cryptocurrency trading infrastructure, order execution, reconciliation, and AWS networking. He combines a quantitative background—masters coursework in computational finance and a B.S. in aerospace engineering—with hands-on trading experience from a decade at Cheiron Trading, giving him rare end-to-end domain expertise from strategy to production. An active open-source contributor to high-profile Rust projects like Apache DataFusion and Hyper, he has improved query engines and HTTP body handling while contributing tests and refactors that boost maintainability. Comfortable across Python (Django/REST, pandas, networkx) and systems-level Rust, he gravitates toward performance-sensitive backend work and reliable deployment in VPCs. Notably, he blends trading instincts with software craftsmanship—exposing advanced APIs and fixing subtle aggregate bugs that improve analytical accuracy for downstream users.
11 years of coding experience
2 years of employment as a software developer
Masters courses in Computational Finance and Risk Management, Masters courses in Computational Finance and Risk Management at University of WashingtonMITUniversity of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
Github Skills (16)
asynchronous10
fusion10
hyper10
query-engine10
http10
rust10
sql10
async10
testing10
arrow-js9
arrow-keys9
regex9
io9
arrows9
dataframes8
Programming languages (10)
Github contributions (5)
apache/datafusion
Apr 2021 - Oct 2024
Apache DataFusion SQL Query Engine
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:5 reviews, 11 PRs, 16 comments in 3 years 7 months
Contributions summary:Michael primarily focused on enhancing and extending the functionality of the Apache DataFusion SQL Query Engine. Their contributions involved adding optional arguments to regular expression User Defined Functions (UDFs) and exposing the fluent API for approximate distinct calculations. They also addressed a bug related to the return type of the regr_count aggregate function and exposed centroids in the approx_percentile_cont fluent API. Furthermore, the user contributed to the testing infrastructure and code refactoring.
querypythonquery-enginedataframerust
hyperium/hyper
Aug 2022 - Dec 2022
An HTTP library for Rust
Role in this project:Backend Developer
Backend DeveloperContributions:5 reviews, 7 commits, 4 PRs in 4 months
Contributions summary:Michael primarily contributed to the `hyper` HTTP library, focusing on refactoring the `Body` struct and related types. Their commits involved renaming types, updating tests, and modifying code in the body and server modules. Additionally, the user worked on removing prefixes and extraneous references in the server and client codebases, enhancing the overall codebase maintainability.
rustio-uringhttp-libraryhyper
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