Sam Smith
Staff Software Engineer at Wikimedia Foundation
United Kingdom
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolSam Smith is a Staff Software Engineer with 14 years of experience, currently building resilient back-end systems at the Wikimedia Foundation after an 11-year tenure there and earlier work at Last.fm. He specializes in improving large, legacy codebases and infrastructure—ranging from refactoring MediaWiki's TemplateParser and cache invalidation logic to strengthening build and test automation for the PHP ZeroMQ extension. Comfortable both leading teams and shipping hands-on technical changes, he has moved between engineering management and senior individual contributor roles. Based in the UK with an MSc in Physics from Warwick, he brings a pragmatic, systems-oriented approach and a knack for making complex, collaborative platforms more reliable and maintainable.
14 years of coding experience
9 years of employment as a software developer
Master of Science (M.Sc.), Physics, 2:1, Master of Science (M.Sc.), Physics, 2:1 at University of Warwick
Github Skills (13)
caching10
php10
zeromq10
build-automation10
cicd10
testing10
exception-handling9
mediawiki9
bash9
docker8
container8
containerization8
wikipedia7
Programming languages (8)
Github contributions (5)
zeromq/php-zmq
Nov 2011 - Jul 2015
ZeroMQ for PHP
Role in this project:
Back-end & DevOps Engineer
Back-end & DevOps EngineerContributions:21 commits, 3 PRs, 31 comments in 3 years 8 months
Contributions summary:Sam primarily focused on improving the build and testing infrastructure for the PHP ZeroMQ extension. They implemented a test runner, integrated different ØMQ versions into the build process, and automated the installation of the extension within the test environment. Further, they made enhancements to the testing framework, including adding a test case and removing tests causing segfaults. The user also addressed code-related issues.
phpzeromqprooph
wikimedia/mediawiki
Feb 2014 - Sep 2022
🌻 The collaborative editing software that runs Wikipedia. Mirror from https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/g/mediawiki/core. See https://mediawiki.org/wiki/Developer_access for contributing.
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:33 commits in 8 years 8 months
Contributions summary:Sam primarily focused on improving the `TemplateParser` component within the MediaWiki project. Their contributions involved refactoring the caching mechanism to include metadata for cache invalidation, enhancing error handling, and improving the handling of recursive partials. They also implemented changes to invalidate the cache when partials are modified. These modifications aimed to improve the efficiency and robustness of template processing within MediaWiki.
wikimediaphpwikipediacollaborative-editingruns
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