Thomas Hunter
Senior Software Engineer at Datadog
San Francisco, California, United States
Summary
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Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolThomas Hunter is a Senior/Staff-level software engineer in San Francisco with 16+ years building scalable, production-grade systems and deep expertise in Node.js, observability, and developer tooling. He currently contributes to Datadog’s dd-trace-js, where he’s delivered OpenAI integrations, ESBuild plugins, automated CI benchmarks and handled customer escalations for a critical APM client. A pragmatic technical leader and mentor, he has led API and batch-processing initiatives at Lob, researched Node.js internals at VMware, and founded a YC-backed startup, demonstrating both product and operational chops. An active open-source contributor, he’s improved notable projects like say.js and helped harden Datadog tracing with performance-focused fixes and benchmarking. He’s also an author of five books (including O’Reilly), an OpenJS-certified practitioner and frequent international speaker, combining strong written communication with deep systems-level intuition.
16 years of coding experience
10 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor of Science - BS, Computer Information Systems, Bachelor of Science - BS, Computer Information Systems at Saginaw Valley State UniversityDelta College
Stackoverflow
5,121reputation
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32questions
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Github Skills (33)
javascript10
multiplatform10
tracer10
cross-platform10
apm10
nodejs10
trace10
platform-independent10
apache9
benchmark9
command-line-interface9
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forms9
benchmarking9
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Programming languages (23)
Github contributions (5)
Marak/say.js
Sep 2014 - Sep 2019
TTS (text to speech) for node.js. send text from node.js to your speakers.
Role in this project:
Full-stack Developer
Full-stack DeveloperContributions:64 commits, 30 PRs, 59 pushes in 5 years 1 month
Contributions summary:Thomas primarily worked on refactoring the `say.js` project. They removed dependencies like `colors` and `translate`. The user improved the project structure by using default node package layout. The user implemented `say.stop()` and added functionality for speech rate adjustments and exporting audio files.
node-jsspeech-to-textnodejsspeakersspeech
DataDog/dd-trace-js
Sep 2022 - Jan 2023
Datadog APM client for Node.js
Role in this project:Backend & DevOps Engineer
Backend & DevOps EngineerContributions:54 releases, 866 reviews, 129 commits in 4 months
Contributions summary:Thomas primarily contributed to the Datadog APM client for Node.js project by focusing on various improvements and bug fixes. These included the implementation of span tracking functionalities, error handling enhancements in Next.js instrumentation, and the integration of benchmarking tools. They also worked on optimizing performance by incorporating instruction countings and reducing benchmark flakiness.
apmjavascripttracingapm-tracertracer
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