Michelle Tilley
Founding Engineer at Atuin
California, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolMichelle Tilley is a founding engineer and CTO-level technologist with 14 years of experience building developer tools, desktop apps, and resilient backend systems from early-stage startups to major OSS projects. Based in California, she led cross-cutting initiatives at GitHub—including the Atom editor and the dark mode rollout—and now helps shape Atuin’s systems and developer experience. Her contributions span full-stack work in Electron and Atom, front-end design system improvements for Primer, and backend CLI and key-value storage features for Atuin, showing fluency across languages and runtimes. She combines pragmatic product focus with low-level systems thinking—taming edge cases like pending file state handling and native password APIs—to improve usability and robustness. Outside of work she’s also a drummer and motorcyclist, a detail that hints at a balance of disciplined precision and adventurous curiosity.
14 years of coding experience
13 years of employment as a software developer
Computer Science, Computer Science at Catawba College
Stackoverflow
158,429reputation
11.9mreached
1,014answers
24questions
angular-ui-router
top-1%
rails-migrations
top-5%
ruby
top-1%
dynamic
top-5%
base64
top-5%
testing
top-5%
Github Skills (127)
atom-editor10
urn10
angular-ui10
package-management10
testing10
command-line-interface10
authentication10
websocket10
ruby10
system10
heroku10
appsettings10
webserver10
browserify10
rake10
Programming languages (19)
Github contributions (5)
git-school/visualizing-git
Apr 2016 - Jan 2019
:framed_picture: Visualize how common Git operations affect the commit graph
Role in this project:
Front-end Developer
Front-end DeveloperContributions:115 commits, 18 PRs, 29 pushes in 2 years 9 months
Contributions summary:Michelle primarily contributed to the front-end components of the project, enhancing the visualization of Git operations. They implemented features to support various Git refspecs such as partial SHA matching, HEAD referencing, and tilde refspecs. The user also introduced improvements to the user interface, including handling the display of detached HEAD states and various other refspec visualizations and corrections.
visualizegit-operationspicturecommitgraph
primer/react
Oct 2019 - Sep 2020
An implementation of GitHub's Primer Design System using React
Role in this project:Front-end Developer
Front-end DeveloperContributions:7 releases, 12 reviews, 339 commits in 11 months
Contributions summary:Michelle primarily contributed to the development of the React-based UI components, as indicated by the code changes in ButtonGroup and Link components. The commits focused on improving component specificity, margins and adding new features. Additionally, the user was involved in fixing linting errors and adjusting test behavior.
primerreactprimer-designdesign-systemcomponent-library
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