Samuel Giddins
Security Engineer at Nerdsniped LLC
Oakland, California, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top School
Top expert inRuby Development and Security Analysis
Samuel Giddins is a seasoned security engineer and technical leader with 13 years of experience building reliable, scalable systems and improving developer workflows across mobile, backend, and build infrastructure. Currently at Persona and running Nerdsniped LLC, he focuses on hardening software supply chains and modernizing platform infrastructure—work informed by a long history leading Bundler/RubyGems releases and improving package security for the Ruby ecosystem. Samuel has driven large migrations (e.g., Bazel adoption at Square), scaled lending products at Cash App to $1B annualized originations, and routinely patches toolchains and build systems to keep developer velocity high. An active open-source maintainer, his contributions span influential projects like CocoaPods, Bazel rules for Swift, Realm, RuboCop and Ruby itself, reflecting deep cross-language build and packaging expertise. Based in Oakland, he pairs hands-on engineering with product-minded leadership and an unusual attention to low-level developer ergonomics—down to eliminating unnecessary string allocations and fixing deterministic build artifacts.
13 years of coding experience
9 years of employment as a software developer
Scarsdale Senior High SchoolB.S Mathematics Economics, B.S Mathematics Economics at University of Chicago
Stackoverflow
4,120reputation
349kreached
106answers
3questions
realm
top-1%
ios
top-5%
swift
top-5%
Github Skills (108)
dependency-management10
rubocop10
mobile-development10
package-management10
testing10
command-line-interface10
databases10
bash10
ruby10
javas10
automation10
realm10
mobile-web10
bundler10
cplus10
Programming languages (27)
Github contributions (5)
CocoaPods/Xcodeproj
Apr 2014 - Feb 2021
Create and modify Xcode projects from Ruby.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:32 releases, 18 reviews, 381 commits in 6 years 11 months
Contributions summary:Samuel primarily contributed to the core functionality of the xcodeproj library. Their work included adding support for new header file extensions and watch product types within the constants module. The user also made various enhancements to the plist helper by improving error messages and ensuring the library handles invalid or missing plist files. Moreover, they addressed issues with target dependencies and compiler flags, showcasing a deep understanding of Xcode project structures.
machplistmodifyrubyxcodeproj
CocoaPods/cocoapods-packager
Jul 2014 - Nov 2018
CocoaPods plugin which allows you to generate a static library from a podspec.
Role in this project:Backend Developer
Backend DeveloperContributions:22 commits, 2 PRs, 7 pushes in 4 years 4 months
Contributions summary:Samuel focused on enhancing the CocoaPods packager by implementing several key features. Their work included improvements to header copying using `ditto`, and supporting the use of podspecs from private spec repositories. Furthermore, they modified the build process to accommodate different platforms and fixed an issue related to generating podspecs. Finally, the user updated the versioning of the library.
objective-ccocoapodsstatic-librarycocoapods-pluginpodspec
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