Samuel Vanderwaal
Senior Software Engineer at Star Atlas
Fairbanks, Alaska, United States
Summary
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Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolSamuel Vanderwaal is a Senior Software Engineer with 13 years of experience building embedded systems and blockchain-native backends from Fairbanks, Alaska. His career spans embedded and research work for satellite communications to hands-on smart contract development in Rust for the Metaplex Program Library, where he implemented nuanced metadata update behaviors and robust collection verification tests. He’s shipped production software at marketplaces and crypto studios (Magic Eden, Metaplex, Tensor Labs) and now contributes to game/metaverse infrastructure at Star Atlas. Comfortable across low-level firmware and high-assurance blockchain code, Samuel blends systems thinking with pragmatic testing discipline. Outside typical roles, he brings space-systems research experience—having helped design the ARC1 CubeSat communications system—which informs his attention to reliability under constrained conditions.
13 years of coding experience
13 years of employment as a software developer
Master of Engineering - MEng, Electrical and Electronics Engineering, Master of Engineering - MEng, Electrical and Electronics Engineering at University of Alaska Fairbanks
Stackoverflow
31reputation
3kreached
1answer
0questions
Github Skills (7)
smart-contracts10
rust10
solana10
nft10
blockchain10
testing9
metaplex6
Programming languages (7)
Github contributions (5)
metaplex-foundation/metaplex-program-library
Dec 2021 - Jan 2023
Smart contracts maintained by the Metaplex team
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:484 reviews, 232 commits, 297 PRs in 1 year 1 month
Contributions summary:Samuel's contributions primarily involve the implementation of smart contracts within the Metaplex program library, as indicated by the focus on the Rust programming language and tests for smart contract updates. The commits demonstrate proficiency in modifying existing smart contract functionality and adding new tests to ensure code quality. Specifically, the user worked on allowing mutable flags to be flipped to false via update_metadata_accounts_v2, which is part of the token-metadata program. The user has also worked on setting and verifying collection items.
solanarustethereumblockchainmetaplex
metaplex-foundation/get-collection
Feb 2022 - Jan 2023
Rust and TypeScript example code for finding all members from a collection id.
Contributions:3 reviews, 5 commits, 3 PRs in 10 months
rustfindingmemberstypescripttypescript-example
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