Mike Lester
Senior Engineer(ing Manager) at thatgamecompany
Boulder, Colorado, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolMike Lester is a senior engineering leader and graphics specialist with 13 years of experience building high-performance rendering systems for games and interactive experiences. Based in Boulder, he has advanced from low-level engine and shader work to leading and hiring engineering teams at thatgamecompany, while also shipping a WebGL/WebAssembly globe engine at ayvri. He contributes significant open-source work to magcius/noclip.website, improving material parsing, GX rendering, and visualizations for a widely admired digital museum of game levels. Mike blends hands-on systems programming (Metal/Vulkan/GLES) with people leadership—protecting teams from scope creep and turning cross‑disciplinary requests into deliverable plans. His background includes graphics tooling at Microsoft’s Xbox group and production optimizations at EA, giving him a rare mix of profiling, shader, and delivery expertise.
13 years of coding experience
10 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor of Science, Computer Science, Bachelor of Science, Computer Science at Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology
Github Skills (8)
typescript10
javascript10
typescripts10
game-development10
typescript-types10
opengl9
3d-graphics9
web-development8
Programming languages (4)
Github contributions (5)
magcius/noclip.website
Dec 2019 - Dec 2019
A digital museum of video game levels
Role in this project:
Full-stack Developer
Full-stack DeveloperContributions:69 reviews, 8 commits, 22 PRs in 14 days
Contributions summary:Mike's contributions focus on the development and enhancement of the `noclip.website` project, a digital museum of video game levels. Their work spans across multiple areas, including implementing flower spawn patterns with parameter parsing and visualization improvements. Furthermore, they refactored the material parsing and display list handling for improved maintainability and generalization, specifically focusing on textures and GX rendering. In addition, they added control over the time of day cycle in the Wind Waker rendering.
gamemuseum-digitalgame-developmentvideo-gamelevels
themikelester/ts-boilerplate
Feb 2020 - Jan 2025
A basic typescript project with good, clean webpack and vscode support
Contributions:8 pushes, 1 branch in 4 years 11 months
vscodevscode-extensioncleantypescript-projectwebpack
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