Sam Handler
Staff Production Engineer at Shopify
Denver, Colorado, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolSam Handler is a Staff Production Engineer based in Denver with 11 years of experience building and operating reliable, scalable platforms across Ruby, Python, Go, and cloud-native tooling. He blends hands-on engineering with leadership—shaping platform strategy, incident response processes, and reliability programs at companies like Shopify and Stitch Fix while running his own consultancy. Deeply experienced in DevOps and infrastructure automation (Terraform, Kubernetes, Helm, Docker) he also contributes to open-source projects including OpenTelemetry Ruby and high-profile civic-data repos that power U.S. congressional datasets. Colleagues rely on him to untangle complex backend systems, harden instrumentation, and make production paths recoverable and repeatable. His background in journalism and civic projects gives him a rare knack for turning messy, real-world data into well-tested, production-grade services.
11 years of coding experience
8 years of employment as a software developer
George Washington High SchoolBA, American Studies, BA, American Studies at Carleton College
English, Spanish
Stackoverflow
1reputation
0reached
0answers
0questions
Github Skills (24)
python10
distributed-tracing10
rspec10
ruby10
regular-expression10
data-gov10
parliamentary-data10
api10
data-cleaning10
data-scraping10
data-processing10
opentelemetry10
telemetry10
government-data10
git-repository9
Programming languages (14)
Github contributions (5)
unitedstates/congress-legislators
Sep 2014 - Jun 2015
Members of the United States Congress, 1789-Present, in YAML/JSON/CSV, as well as committees, presidents, and vice presidents.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:40 commits, 34 PRs, 34 pushes in 9 months
Contributions summary:Sam primarily focused on maintaining and extending the functionality of scripts within the `congress-legislators` repository, likely to update and refine the data pertaining to U.S. Congress members. Their contributions involved modifying Python scripts to add/remove legislator entries, updating social media data, and fixing formatting issues. Furthermore, they updated social media data by adding Instagram accounts and retrieving numerical Instagram IDs.
csvcongressmemberscsv-jsonjson
open-telemetry/opentelemetry-ruby
Apr 2022 - Jan 2023
OpenTelemetry Ruby API & SDK, and related gems
Role in this project:Back-end Developer & Test Automation Engineer
Back-end Developer & Test Automation EngineerContributions:131 reviews, 15 commits, 34 PRs in 9 months
Contributions summary:Sam primarily focused on improving the stability and correctness of the OpenTelemetry Ruby SDK. Their contributions included fixing bugs related to attribute value validation, adding context propagation for MySQL2 instrumentation, and refining the Sidekiq instrumentation to ensure compatibility with the latest version. They also addressed issues with the exporter, and made changes to improve the test suite. These changes show a deep understanding of the internal workings of the SDK and the ability to write and maintain integration tests.
opentelemetryapiapi-sdktracingruby
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