Mike Linksvayer
VP, Developer Policy at GitHub
San Francisco, California, United States
Summary
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RockstarMike Linksvayer is an experienced software and policy leader with 14 years in developer-facing roles, currently serving as VP of Developer Policy at GitHub from San Francisco. He blends hands-on engineering—contributions to notable open-source projects like choosealicense.com, licensee, and opensource.guide—with high-level policy and community stewardship rooted in a long association with Creative Commons. A former cofounder and architect at Bitzi, he brings entrepreneurial instincts and deep familiarity with licensing, localization, and web front-end and back-end codebases. His GitHub persona—wryly self-described as a “pre-epochal parasite; post-epochal scavenger”—hints at a pragmatic, systems-thinking approach to sustaining open ecosystems.
14 years of coding experience
7 years of employment as a software developer
Github Skills (20)
javascript10
maintenance10
licensing10
translation10
rubygems10
testing10
open-source10
internationalization10
ruby10
localization10
jekyll10
code-cleanup10
html10
command-line-interface9
command-line9
Programming languages (25)
Github contributions (5)
licensee/licensee
Mar 2016 - Jan 2023
A Ruby Gem to detect under what license a project is distributed.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer & Community Contributor
Back-end Developer & Community ContributorContributions:3 releases, 163 reviews, 428 commits in 6 years 10 months
Contributions summary:Mike primarily contributed to the development and maintenance of the `licensee/licensee` project, a Ruby gem for license detection. They focused on improving license detection accuracy, including handling cases with modified or removed titles, and addressing false positives. The user also worked on expanding the tool's functionality, such as supporting license files and implementing command-line usage. Furthermore, they were involved in adapting the tool based on changes in license specifications, like those from choosealicense.com.
licensingruby-gemlegallawrails
github/choosealicense.com
Dec 2015 - Dec 2022
A site to provide non-judgmental guidance on choosing a license for your open source project
Role in this project:Full-stack Developer
Full-stack DeveloperContributions:53 reviews, 776 commits, 561 PRs in 7 years 1 month
Contributions summary:Mike made several contributions focused on improving the functionality and maintainability of the project. They consolidated and removed outdated content, updated code to match the style guidelines, and upgraded the project to Jekyll 3.0. Furthermore, they added tests to ensure proper license file structure and included license information on the homepage.
licensinglawopen-source-licensingguidancejekyll
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