Mike Helmick
Lead Core Services Engineer at Wowza
Canfield, Ohio, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolMike Helmick is a Lead Core Services Engineer with 14 years of experience building backend systems and cloud infrastructure, now driving core services at Wowza. He brings deep Python expertise from long-term roles as a backend lead and principal engineer, complemented by hands-on work with AWS, Terraform, GCP, and growing Go and frontend skills. Mike has a track record of improving API client libraries in notable open-source projects—contributing profile-image and auth fixes to the popular Twython Twitter wrapper and enhancing the python-instagram client for reliability. He excels at modernizing legacy systems and shipping dependable integrations for media and API-driven platforms. Based in Canfield, Ohio, he pairs practical production experience with a willingness to learn new stacks and cloud providers. His career shows a steady progression from web developer to technical leader who balances coding contributions with architecture and delivery.
14 years of coding experience
14 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor Computer Science, Bachelor Computer Science at Youngstown State University
Github Skills (11)
instagram-api10
api10
python10
apidoc10
http-request10
oauth9
integrations9
webapi9
httpwebrequest8
request-handler8
webrequest8
Programming languages (10)
Github contributions (5)
ryanmcgrath/twython
Jan 2012 - Mar 2020
Actively maintained, pure Python wrapper for the Twitter API. Supports both normal and streaming Twitter APIs.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:7 releases, 268 commits, 44 PRs in 8 years 3 months
Contributions summary:Mike contributed significantly to the pure Python wrapper for the Twitter API, enhancing its functionality. Their commits focused on implementing and refining features related to updating user profile information, specifically adding support for profile images, background images and banners. They also updated the setup to include 'requests' as a required package and also worked to address potential issues with the Twitter API's authentication flow.
apiactively-maintainedpythonpython-wrappertwitter-streaming
facebookarchive/python-instagram
Feb 2012 - May 2012
Python Client for Instagram API
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:9 commits in 3 months
Contributions summary:Mike primarily contributed to the Python-based Instagram API client, fixing bugs and improving code quality. They addressed issues related to mutable default arguments, fixed API client functionality, and added a helper for timestamp conversions. Furthermore, the user added a new user relationship method and implemented the integration with the Instagram API. These changes enhanced the library's functionality and maintainability.
apipythoninstagram-apipython-clientinstagram
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