Michael Welsh
Developer at The Behemoth
San Diego, California, United States
Summary
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Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolMichael Welsh is a game-focused developer with 17 years of experience building tools and engines that boost creative productivity, currently shipping games at The Behemoth from San Diego. He is a systems-minded programmer fluent in Rust, C++, and Haxe who contributes to high-profile open-source projects—most notably Ruffle, a widely watched reimplementation of the Adobe Flash Player that restores legacy content via a Rust AVM1 engine. Michael’s past work at Newgrounds and contributions to Haxe and stdweb show a pattern of tackling compatibility, IO ergonomics, and web API surface correctness, often backed by unit tests and careful refactors. He co-organizes the San Diego Rust User Group, signaling a community-first approach to language advocacy and tooling. Outside of code, he channels competitive instincts into pinball, a hobby that mirrors his attention to detail and drive for iterative improvement.
17 years of coding experience
7 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor's degree, Computer Science, Bachelor's degree, Computer Science at Penn State University
Github Skills (18)
unit-testing10
javascript10
interpretation10
event-handling10
haxe10
cross-platform10
webpages10
io10
web-content10
bytecode10
html10
rust10
webassembly10
programming-language9
computer-engineering9
Programming languages (11)
Github contributions (5)
ruffle-rs/ruffle
Aug 2016 - Dec 2022
A Flash Player emulator written in Rust
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:1085 reviews, 1587 commits, 2500 PRs in 6 years 4 months
Contributions summary:Michael focused on the AVM1 (Action Message Format 1) implementation, contributing to the core functionality of a Flash Player emulator written in Rust. The user implemented new features and resolved bugfixes related to critical aspects of the AVM1 engine, including object comparisons, function calls, and frame execution. These improvements improved the emulator's compatibility with older Flash content and enhanced the fidelity of ActionScript execution.
playeremulatorrustflashreimplementation
koute/stdweb
Aug 2017 - Jan 2018
A standard library for the client-side Web
Role in this project:Full-stack Developer
Full-stack DeveloperContributions:13 commits, 7 PRs, 5 comments in 4 months
Contributions summary:Michael primarily contributed to the `stdweb` project by implementing and refining web API interfaces, focusing on the `Event` and `HTMLImageElement` APIs. Their work included adding new methods and properties, fixing existing issues, and implementing unit tests to ensure functionality. Furthermore, the user refactored the code, including adding error handling, and ensuring that it aligned with web standards and specifications.
emscriptenclient-siderustasmjsjavascript
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