Michelle Mcdaniel
Senior Software Engineer at Microsoft
Redmond, Washington, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolMichelle Mcdaniel is a Senior Software Engineer in Redmond with 11 years of experience building resilient build, test, and performance automation for large-scale .NET projects at Microsoft. She specializes in back-end and DevOps engineering, having improved cross-platform build tooling, Helix job orchestration, and automated performance benchmarking integrated with Azure DevOps and BenchView. Her open-source contributions to prominent dotnet repos (arcade, performance, llilc) show a pragmatic focus on developer experience—converting tools to Python, hardening environment validation scripts, and enhancing test-result collection and formats. Comfortable working close to runtime and CI infrastructure, she combines deep systems knowledge with a knack for making complex pipelines diagnosable and repeatable. A longtime contributor with a master's from UVA, she jokes on GitHub that she’s “actually a cat,” signaling a playful attention to detail and team culture.
11 years of coding experience
12 years of employment as a software developer
University of GeorgiaMaster of Computer Science, Computer Science, Master of Computer Science, Computer Science at University of Virginia
Github Skills (32)
azure-devops-server10
python10
scripting10
llvm10
cicd10
pyscript10
automation10
azure-devops10
ci-cd-pipeline10
build-automation10
dotnet-core10
powershell10
automations10
python-scripts10
csharp10
Programming languages (11)
Github contributions (5)
dotnet/arcade
Jan 2019 - Dec 2022
Tools that provide common build infrastructure for multiple .NET Foundation projects.
Role in this project:
Back-end & DevOps Engineer
Back-end & DevOps EngineerContributions:274 reviews, 136 commits, 198 PRs in 3 years 11 months
Contributions summary:Michelle's contributions center around enhancing the Helix infrastructure within the .NET Arcade repository. They introduced and refined the `ResultContainerPrefix` parameter in job creation, modifying code in `JobDefinition.cs` and `JobCreationRequest.cs`. Further work involved refactoring the code to accommodate new parameters, updating generated code files, and refining the logic for creating container names, including implementing character replacements. Additionally, the user added and modified support for the TRX test results format.
dotnetinfrastructurefoundationcsharpdotnet-core
dotnet/performance
Mar 2018 - Oct 2022
This repo contains benchmarks used for testing the performance of all .NET Runtimes
Role in this project:DevOps Engineer
DevOps EngineerContributions:112 commits, 143 PRs, 59 pushes in 4 years 7 months
Contributions summary:Michelle primarily focused on automating the performance testing and build processes within the .NET performance repository. Their contributions involved creating and modifying scripts to download and install .NET SDKs, set up environment variables, and generate machine setup scripts for the lab environments. They also worked on integrating the build and test processes with Azure DevOps pipelines, including the upload of test results to BenchView. The user's work facilitated the automated execution and reporting of performance benchmarks for the .NET runtime.
dotnetbenchmarkingruntimestestingbenchmark
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