Sam Harwell
Senior Software Engineer, .NET at Microsoft
Houston, Texas, United States
Summary
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Rockstar🎓
Top School
Top expert inCross-Platform Development and Programming Languages
Sam Harwell is a Senior Software Engineer with 17 years of experience focused on .NET, compilers, tooling, and build systems, currently at Microsoft in Houston. He combines deep backend expertise—contributing to high-profile projects like Roslyn, MSBuild, ASP.NET Core, and the ANTLR runtimes—with practical DevOps and automation skills around CI/CD, code coverage, and packaging. Sam’s work often targets parser, code-generation, and performance challenges (e.g., Groovy parser ATN tuning, Roslyn syntax visualizer theming, and Razor allocation reductions), showing a knack for both low-level runtime details and developer UX. He routinely improves code quality and build reliability across ecosystems, having modernized projects for .NET Standard, added tests and source generators, and streamlined build tooling. Based in Houston, he pairs an electrical engineering background from UT Austin with graduate software engineering study, and—true to his GitHub bio—turns coffee into code while quietly improving the developer experience of widely used open-source platforms.
17 years of coding experience
4 years of employment as a software developer
B.S., Electrical Engineering, B.S., Electrical Engineering at The University of Texas at Austin
Stackoverflow
98,855reputation
10.7mreached
1,534answers
56questions
grammar
top-1%
debugging
top-5%
dictionary
top-5%
console-application
top-5%
dynamic
top-5%
task-parallel-library
top-5%
Github Skills (154)
nuget10
parserator10
parser10
github10
multithreading10
abstract-syntax-tree10
testing10
command-line-interface10
test-framework10
instrumentation10
standardized10
asp-net-core10
asp-net10
javas10
vbnet10
Programming languages (19)
Github contributions (5)
antlr/antlr3
Mar 2011 - Dec 2014
antlr v3 repository (pulled from p4 with history from //depot/code/antlr/antlr3-main
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:249 commits, 3 comments, 1 issue in 3 years 9 months
Contributions summary:Sam primarily contributed to the ANTLR 3 repository by converting Tool grammars to ANTLR v3. This involved modifying existing grammars, and updating test files. Additionally, the user made changes to the Java runtime and documentation, including fixing issues with semantic predicates, adding exceptions, and fixing a potential infinite loop. The contributions focused on improving the ANTLR tool and runtime environment.
antlr
dotnet/roslyn-sdk
Feb 2018 - Jun 2022
Roslyn-SDK templates and Syntax Visualizer
Role in this project:Backend Developer
Backend DeveloperContributions:168 reviews, 625 commits, 545 PRs in 4 years 4 months
Contributions summary:Sam contributed to the Roslyn SDK, working on tasks related to code analysis and syntax visualization. Their commits involved modifying C# project files to prevent the deployment of older SDK versions and to work around issues in the RepoToolset. The user also made improvements to the syntax visualizer component, incorporating theming for the property grid, tree view and UI and adding support for diagnostics presentation and source navigation. These changes indicate a focus on enhancing the usability and functionality of the SDK for developers.
roslynsdk
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