Mike Droettboom
Principal Software Engineer at NVIDIA
Cambridge, Maryland, United States
Summary
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Rockstar🎓
Top School
Top expert inScientific Computing and Data Science
Mike Droettboom is a Principal Software Engineer and long-time Python core developer with 23 years of experience building high-performance systems and developer tools. He has led teams at Microsoft and Mozilla, contributed foundational work to projects like Pyodide and matplotlib, and now focuses on Python + CUDA at NVIDIA. His open-source footprint spans language internals (cpython), scientific computing (numpy, astropy), interactive tooling (IPython, Jupyter), and webassembly-based Python in the browser (pyodide), reflecting deep cross-stack expertise. Mike pairs systems-level engineering—compiler/emscripten and performance benchmarking work—with front-end polish on notebook and plotting UIs, a combination that surfaces in robust, user-facing developer tools. He also applies a curious interdisciplinary background in music and computer music research, hosting a weekly big-band radio show, which informs his collaborative, creative approach to engineering.
23 years of coding experience
25 years of employment as a software developer
Johns Hopkins UniversityB.A. Computer Science and Music Double Major, B.A. Computer Science and Music Double Major at York University
Github Skills (81)
notebook10
benchmark10
restructuredtext10
python10
json-schema10
astronomy10
testing10
command-line-interface10
ipython10
rust-wasm10
javas10
javascript10
performance-monitor10
gles10
text-manipulation10
Programming languages (21)
Github contributions (5)
json-schema-org/understanding-json-schema
Sep 2013 - Apr 2020
A website aiming to provide more accessible documentation for JSON schema.
Role in this project:
Technical Writer
Technical WriterContributions:197 commits, 55 PRs, 93 pushes in 6 years 8 months
Contributions summary:Mike's contributions primarily revolve around creating and modifying documentation for the JSON Schema project. They added and revised content within the `source` directory, including reference documentation on various JSON Schema elements like basic types, regular expressions, and combining schemas. They also made improvements to the project's structure, including the addition of new sections and updating the table of contents. The user also made some improvements to the visual presentation of the documentation by updating CSS and enabling various new themes and elements, demonstrating a solid understanding of documentation and project presentation.
ajvjsonldjsonschemaaccessibleaiming
matplotlib/matplotlib
Jul 2007 - Nov 2018
matplotlib: plotting with Python
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:3920 commits, 317 PRs, 208 pushes in 11 years 6 months
Contributions summary:Mike primarily contributed to the back-end of the project by addressing and fixing bugs. The commits indicate work on improving the rendering process, specifically handling issues with path clipping, error bar extensions, and text rendering, addressing a variety of edge cases and rendering errors. This work included addressing memory management issues as well, by fixing reference counting.
pythondata-sciencegtkdata-visualizationplotting
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