Mikel Blanchard
Principal Software Engineer at CoStar Group
Anaheim, California, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolMikel Blanchard is a Principal Software Engineer with two decades of experience building secure, scalable systems across payments, FinTech, real estate, and enterprise software. He combines hands-on backend development in the Microsoft .NET stack with architecture-level thinking—designing high-throughput payment gateways, tokenization and provisioning systems, and commercially resilient APIs that handled millions of transactions per day. At Microsoft he maintains OpenTelemetry .NET and has contributed performance and reliability fixes to high-profile projects like ASP.NET Core and dotnet/runtime, bringing observability and allocation savings into production systems. Mikel favors simple, maintainable designs that anticipate business volatility and prioritizes asking “why” to turn complex requirements into valuable, testable solutions. Based in Anaheim, he’s equally passionate about mentoring teams, coffee, and playing hockey when not instrumenting distributed systems.
9 years of coding experience
17 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor of Business Administration (BBA) Business Law Computer Science, Bachelor of Business Administration (BBA) Business Law Computer Science at Loyola Marymount University
Stackoverflow
41reputation
661reached
1answer
0questions
Github Skills (27)
unit-testing10
debug10
distributed-tracing10
net10
dotnet10
data-serialization10
asp-net-core10
serialization10
netframework10
asp-net10
deserialization10
system-text-json10
localization10
wcf10
dotnet-core10
Programming languages (12)
Github contributions (5)
open-telemetry/opentelemetry-dotnet
Feb 2020 - Jan 2023
The OpenTelemetry .NET Client
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer & Instrumentation Engineer
Back-end Developer & Instrumentation EngineerContributions:10 releases, 2190 reviews, 234 commits in 2 years 11 months
Contributions summary:Mikel's primary contribution was implementing and enhancing the ParentOrElse sampler, which is crucial for distributed tracing in .NET applications. They introduced the ParentOrElseActivitySampler, updated existing sampling algorithms to align with specification changes, and fixed documentation and code style issues. The user also addressed threading issues, implemented Jaeger and Zipkin exporter fixes, and added code to handle edge cases within the batching processor to ensure reliability and prevent data loss.
instrumentation-librariesiloggerprovidertracingloggingilogger
open-telemetry/opentelemetry-dotnet-contrib
Jul 2020 - Jan 2023
This repository contains set of components extending functionality of the OpenTelemetry .NET SDK. Instrumentation libraries, exporters, and other components can find their home here.
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:6 releases, 663 reviews, 22 commits in 2 years 5 months
Contributions summary:Mikel primarily contributed to the WCF instrumentation component, adding new features and improving existing functionality. They focused on implementing and testing WCF instrumentation, including support for .NET Core, and adding features like support for `To` & `Via` properties. Additionally, the user addressed bug fixes, code reviews, and made improvements to the documentation. Furthermore, the user updated the WCF assembly name, namespace, and supported .NET Framework version.
instrumentationdotnetexportersinstrumentation-librariessdk
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