Nathan Shively-sanders
Senior Software Engineer at Microsoft
Redmond, Washington, United States
Summary
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Rockstar🎓
Top School
Top expert inFull-Stack JavaScript Development
Nathan Shively-sanders is a Senior Software Engineer with 17 years of experience specializing in compilers, language tooling, and developer-facing systems, currently driving TypeScript compiler development and community contribution workflows at Microsoft. He has deep expertise across parsing, binding, type checking, interactive language services and code generation, and has materially improved JavaScript/TypeScript support used by millions through contributions to the TypeScript repo and DefinitelyTyped. Comfortable in multiple languages (Python, Haskell, JavaScript), he blends production-grade engineering with research instincts from a PhD in computational linguistics—applying statistical methods and dialectometry to problems like type inference and tooling resilience. Nathan frequently tackles thorny backward-compatibility issues (CommonJS, JSDoc, legacy JS patterns) and is known for improving parser robustness, scanner recovery, and test coverage across high-profile repos like VS Code, vetur, and dts-gen. He also mentors maintainers and helps large open-source communities scale contributions, ensuring popular packages are correct and easy to publish.
17 years of coding experience
4 years of employment as a software developer
Ph D, Computational Linguistics, Ph D, Computational Linguistics at Indiana University BloomingtonBA, Computer Science, French, Spanish, BA, Computer Science, French, Spanish at College of the Ozarks
Stackoverflow
18,339reputation
947kreached
141answers
10questions
recursion
top-5%
artificial-intelligence
top-1%
iteration
top-5%
composition
top-5%
scheme
top-5%
functional-programming
top-1%
Github Skills (78)
eslint-plugin-jsdoc10
parser10
package-management10
python10
abstract-syntax-tree10
compiler-development10
testing10
type-definition10
automation10
code-generation10
lexical-analysis10
webserver10
web-development10
tslint10
scanner10
Programming languages (14)
Github contributions (5)
DefinitelyTyped/DefinitelyTyped
Dec 2015 - Jan 2023
The repository for high quality TypeScript type definitions.
Role in this project:
Front-end Developer
Front-end DeveloperContributions:1013 reviews, 2493 commits, 5043 PRs in 7 years 2 months
Contributions summary:Nathan primarily contributed to the enhancement and maintenance of TypeScript type definitions within the DefinitelyTyped repository. Their contributions included updating and refining type definitions for JavaScript libraries such as React-Native, and libraries associated with the tools. The user also worked to resolve compatibility issues, improved code organization, and addressed various linting issues, demonstrating a focus on code quality and developer experience within the project.
typescript-definitionstype-definitionshigh-qualitydtsdefinitions
microsoft/types-publisher
Mar 2018 - May 2020
This repo has moved:
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:514 commits, 229 PRs, 507 pushes in 2 years 2 months
Contributions summary:Nathan primarily focused on improving the `types-publisher` repository, likely related to publishing TypeScript declaration files. They improved error handling, assertions, and overall code quality by fixing linting issues and converting tabs to spaces. A significant portion of their work involved debugging and refining the publishing process, including debugging github queries, commenting and adding logging.
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