Tian Gao
Mountain View, California, United States
Summary
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RockstarTian Gao is a Senior Software Engineer based in California with a decade of experience building performant systems in C and Python, currently working on PySpark at Databricks and serving as a Python Core Developer and pdb maintainer. He authored VizTracer (7k+ stars) and several other popular debugging and instrumentation tools—coredumpy, dowhen, watchpoints and objprint—reflecting a deep focus on observability and developer tooling. At the Python Software Foundation he made pdb dramatically faster and implemented PEP 667 to give consistent local-variable views, while contributing bug fixes and tests to CPython’s debugger and tracing subsystems. His career spans embedded FPGA/firmware work that shipped in commercial probe hardware to cloud-scale ML tooling at Microsoft, giving him a rare blend of low-level systems, instrumentation, and high-level Python expertise. An engaging speaker at PyCon US 2024 and 2025 and a tech influencer with 200k+ followers, he combines open-source stewardship with a knack for turning debugging research into practical, widely adopted tools.
10 years of coding experience
Github Skills (5)
debugging10
debug10
python10
testing10
documentation7
Programming languages (12)
Github contributions (5)
python/cpython
Jun 2021 - Apr 2025
The Python programming language
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:442 reviews, 286 PRs, 82 pushes in 3 years 10 months
Contributions summary:Tian primarily focused on debugging and improving the Python debugger (pdb) within the cpython repository. Their work included fixing bugs related to local variable changes, improving multi-line statement support, addressing issues with convenience variables, and enhancing the handling of exception information. The user also contributed to the documentation, by improving accuracy of examples and descriptions. Moreover, they were involved in adding tests for commands such as display, alias, and where.
python-programmingprogramming-languagepythonpython-programming-language
gaogaotiantian/viztracer-vscode
Dec 2023 - Feb 2025
VS Code extension for VizTracer
Contributions:1 review, 3 PRs, 22 pushes in 1 year 2 months
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