Simon Taranto
Staff Software Engineer at GitHub
United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolSimon Taranto is a Staff Software Engineer with over a decade of production experience, currently driving backend and full-stack work at GitHub. He combines deep Ruby/Rails expertise with spatial database knowledge—having improved the activerecord-postgis-adapter—and a track record of shipping durable UI components for Primer’s view_components. His contributions span automated code review systems (Hound) and schema-safe backend refactors, reflecting a focus on maintainability, efficient queries, and robust API error handling. Comfortable across the stack, he pairs engineering leadership with hands-on development, documentation, and testing to make components and services easier to use and evolve. An unconventional background in biological engineering hints at a systems-oriented mindset and curiosity for cross-disciplinary problems.
12 years of coding experience
B.S., Biological Engineering; Natural & Environmental Systems Minor, B.S., Biological Engineering; Natural & Environmental Systems Minor at Cornell UniversitySemester Program, Semester Program at The Mountain School of Milton Academy
Stackoverflow
1,270reputation
213kreached
36answers
12questions
Github Skills (31)
ruby-rails10
postgresql10
testing10
component-development10
rails10
carbon-design-system10
system-design10
ruby10
system10
postgis10
github-api10
sys10
viewcomponent10
activerecord10
documentation10
Programming languages (17)
Github contributions (5)
primer/view_components
Jan 2021 - Mar 2021
ViewComponents for the Primer Design System
Role in this project:
Full-stack Developer
Full-stack DeveloperContributions:262 reviews, 405 commits, 117 PRs in 2 months
Contributions summary:Simon primarily focused on enhancing the Primer ViewComponents library by adding and refining various UI components. Their work involved updating configuration files, refactoring code for improved efficiency, addressing deprecation warnings, and incorporating new features. The user's contributions extended to adding examples, documentation, and unit tests, demonstrating a commitment to improving the usability and maintainability of the component library.
primerrailsviewcomponentsprimer-designruby
houndci/hound
Apr 2014 - Apr 2015
Automated code review for GitHub pull requests.
Role in this project:Backend Developer
Backend DeveloperContributions:25 commits, 30 PRs, 102 pushes in 1 year
Contributions summary:Simon primarily focused on backend development tasks, specifically within the context of automated code review. Their contributions involved modifying job processing logic for error handling, including exception handling for Octokit and related Github API interactions. Furthermore, the user enhanced the database schema by adding timestamps to existing database tables and altering code to reflect changes to the database schema. In addition, the user refactored a query for improved efficiency.
reacthoundrailsjavascriptautomated-code-review
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