Samantha Houts
Engineering Director, Windows at DuckDuckGo
California, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top School
Top expert inXamarin and .NET MAUI Development
Samantha Houts is an engineering director and seasoned software leader with over a decade of experience building cross-platform UI frameworks and leading second-level engineering teams from startups to Fortune 50s. She guided the evolution and launch of .NET MAUI at Microsoft, blending hands-on fixes for accessibility and rendering bugs with strategic roadmap planning and partner collaboration across .NET, Visual Studio, and Windows. A highly technical manager with a BA in Philosophy, she applies formal critical thinking and logic to architecture, prioritization, and complex problem solving. Her open-source contributions to Xamarin.Forms and .NET MAUI show deep expertise in mobile UI, accessibility, and race-condition hardening on iOS and Android. Known for advanced listening and communication skills, she also built an Azure-hosted prioritization service combining Blazor, CosmosDB, and serverless functions to improve backlog planning and customer outcomes. Now directing Windows engineering at DuckDuckGo, she continues to bridge product strategy with engineering execution.
10 years of coding experience
18 years of employment as a software developer
BA Philosophy, BA Philosophy at University of California, Riverside
English
Github Skills (16)
android-developers10
android-developer10
mobile10
uid10
debug10
ios10
xamarin-forms10
cross-platform10
csharp10
ui-design10
multiplatform10
front-end-development10
dotnet-core10
android9
accessibility9
Programming languages (4)
Github contributions (5)
xamarin/Xamarin.Forms
Mar 2016 - Oct 2020
Xamarin.Forms Official Home
Role in this project:
Mobile Developer (Xamarin.Forms)
Mobile Developer (Xamarin.Forms)Contributions:1 release, 24 reviews, 538 commits in 4 years 7 months
Contributions summary:Samantha primarily contributed to the UI and user experience of the Xamarin.Forms application by implementing fixes for specific issues. These changes involved resolving problems with the layout and rendering of UI elements such as ListViews, Buttons, and Frames on Android and iOS platforms, showing experience in cross-platform mobile UI development. The user also addressed problems related to keyboard interaction and screen reader accessibility, improving the application's usability. Additionally, the user improved general functionality in the navigation page by handling cases like modal pages and the ability to set the title view.
user-interfacexamarincross-platformxamarin-formsmicrosoft
dotnet/maui
Oct 2022 - Oct 2022
.NET MAUI is the .NET Multi-platform App UI, a framework for building native device applications spanning mobile, tablet, and desktop.
Role in this project:Mobile Developer (iOS)
Mobile Developer (iOS)Contributions:94 reviews, 4 commits, 40 PRs in 1 day
Contributions summary:Samantha contributed to the .NET MAUI framework by addressing multiple bugs related to iOS components. Specifically, they fixed layout issues in ViewCells with accessories, resolved issues with screen reader accessibility, and addressed problems with the rendering and focus behavior of elements within ListViews, including addressing crashes in the framework caused by race conditions or incorrectly implemented callbacks. The commits also included several test cases to verify the fixes and maintain code quality.
app-platformmauimulti-platformiosmicrosoft
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