Taylor Southwick
Principal Software Engineer at Microsoft
Redmond, Washington, United States
Summary
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Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolTaylor Southwick is a Principal Software Engineer with 12 years at Microsoft, specializing in .NET platform evolution, portability tooling, and customer-facing prototyping to help migrate legacy apps to modern .NET and Azure. He began shipping Compact Framework work for Windows Embedded and progressed through roles testing and owning BCL areas like XML and globalization, blending deep framework knowledge with pragmatic tooling. Taylor drives product change by translating customer POCs and migration exercises into platform improvements, and he’s contributed to high-profile OSS projects such as the .NET Portability Analyzer, Autofac, Roslyn analyzers, and the Open XML SDK. His contributions often focus on refactoring, test automation, and maintainability—introducing abstractions like VersionProvider and OutputWriter to make tools more testable and flexible. Based in Redmond, he pairs a strong engineering craft with a research background in computation and systems biology, bringing analytical rigor and tool-building instincts to large-scale developer platforms.
12 years of coding experience
10 years of employment as a software developer
Doctor of Philosophy - PhD (Unfinished), Computation and Systems Biology, Doctor of Philosophy - PhD (Unfinished), Computation and Systems Biology at Washington University in St. LouisBioinformatics/Mathematics, Bioinformatics/Mathematics at Brigham Young University
English, Russian
Stackoverflow
1,476reputation
116kreached
13answers
6questions
google-api
top-5%
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Github Skills (61)
unit-testing10
nuget10
razor10
ioc-container10
xaml10
msbuild10
component-development10
net10
uwp10
dotnet10
winui10
xsd10
asp-net-core10
xunit10
mvvm10
Programming languages (19)
Github contributions (5)
dotnet/Open-XML-SDK
Oct 2016 - Jan 2023
Open XML SDK by Microsoft
Role in this project:
Backend Developer & Test Automation Engineer
Backend Developer & Test Automation EngineerContributions:13 releases, 429 reviews, 583 commits in 6 years 4 months
Contributions summary:Taylor implemented enhancements and resolved bugs in the Open XML SDK, focusing on document traversal and open XML reader/writer functionalities. Their work included the use of embedded streaming for document traverse tests, ensuring the correct handling of comment and other miscellaneous nodes and adding tests for the same. The commits also involved refactoring and adding automated tests, showcasing a focus on code quality and reliability within the project.
xmldocxsdkpptxopen-xml-sdk
dotnet/upgrade-assistant
Nov 2020 - Jul 2022
A tool to assist developers in upgrading .NET Framework applications to .NET 6 and beyond
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:615 reviews, 286 commits, 284 PRs in 1 year 8 months
Contributions summary:Taylor primarily focused on refactoring and upgrading the .NET upgrade assistant tool. Their contributions included converting abstractions to target .NET Standard 2.0, ensuring the tool works on Windows platforms, and enabling functionality to search for packages and analyze existing project references. Additionally, the user implemented command line options and feature flags for controlling the output log. These changes involved updating various components and dependencies, including changes to project files and the tool's core logic.
dotnetwindowsnet-frameworkassistc-sharp
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