Nathan Mills
Senior Software Engineeer at Derivita
Herriman, Utah, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolNathan Mills is a senior software engineer with 13 years of experience building and leading backend systems, currently driving development at Derivita from Herriman, Utah. He spent a decade at Instructure advancing Canvas LMS internals—improving APIs, database interactions, localization, and external tool integrations—and briefly managed two distributed engineering teams across the US and Budapest. Comfortable both as an individual contributor and as a manager, he blends hands-on refactoring and API design with people leadership and contractor integration. His early career spans robust server-side work in Java, Groovy, and Erlang, evidencing a deep backend focus and adaptability across languages and architectures. Notably, he has contributed to the popular open-source Canvas LMS, strengthening sessionless launches and file authentication for real-world edtech use cases.
13 years of coding experience
13 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor of Science (B.S.), Computer Science, Bachelor of Science (B.S.), Computer Science at Weber State UniversityAssociate of Science (A.S.), Computer Science, Associate of Science (A.S.), Computer Science at Salt Lake Community College
Github Skills (10)
ruby10
api10
apidoc10
back-end-development10
user-authentication9
rails9
authentication9
ruby-rails9
database-management8
git7
Programming languages (13)
Github contributions (5)
instructure/canvas-lms
Nov 2012 - Dec 2020
The open LMS by Instructure, Inc.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:311 commits, 1 PR, 1 push in 8 years 2 months
Contributions summary:Nathan primarily contributed to the back-end development of the Canvas LMS, focusing on refactoring and enhancing API endpoints and database interactions. They worked on improving the scopes API endpoint to allow grouping, and also added support for localized resource names. Additionally, the user addressed issues related to sessionless launches for external tools, and made updates to the InstFS token generation process and file authentication. These changes collectively improved the system's functionality and maintainability.
open-lmsinstructurecanvas-lmslmsinc
rivernate/dotfiles
Apr 2022 - Feb 2025
chezmoi managed dot files
Contributions:346 PRs, 188 pushes, 346 branches in 2 years 10 months
dotfileschezmoidotdot-files
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