Tom Dykstra
Programming Writer at Microsoft
Bellevue, Washington, United States
Summary
🤩
RockstarTom Dykstra is a Programming Writer at Microsoft with 14 years of experience translating deep .NET and ASP.NET Core concepts into clear, actionable documentation and samples. He pairs technical writing with hands-on back-end contributions, improving .NET samples, system.text.json examples, and API reference snippets that tackle tricky topics like UTF-16 surrogate handling and Rune usage. Based in Bellevue, Washington, he focuses on making complex serialization, encoding, and System.CommandLine scenarios approachable for developers. Tom’s work on high-profile Microsoft open-source repos—dotnet/docs, AspNetCore.Docs, EntityFramework.Docs, and dotnet-api-docs—shows a blend of pedagogy and pragmatic code fixes. Colleagues rely on him not just for polished prose but for code-first examples that reduce developer friction and update guidance to match evolving .NET APIs. His unique strength is turning subtle platform edge cases into teachable, reproducible samples.
14 years of coding experience
Stackoverflow
5,930reputation
2.7mreached
92answers
1question
ef-code-first
top-1%
azure
top-5%
entity-framework
top-1%
json
top-5%
serialization
top-5%
Github Skills (38)
strings10
ef-code-first10
text-manipulation10
net10
mvc10
dotnet10
data-serialization10
entity-framework-core10
asp-net-core10
serialization10
asp-net10
deserialization10
vbnet10
entity-framework10
dotnet-core10
Programming languages (16)
Github contributions (5)
dotnet/AspNetCore.Docs
Jul 2016 - Jan 2023
Documentation for ASP.NET Core
Role in this project:
Technical Writer
Technical WriterContributions:651 reviews, 738 commits, 2011 PRs in 6 years 7 months
Contributions summary:Tom's commits primarily focus on documentation updates within the ASP.NET Core documentation repository. Their contributions include fixing typos, adding instructions, correcting broken links, and modifying guidance. They also made substantial contributions, initiating a draft of the EF MVC tutorial series, indicating a focus on creating and improving instructional content for developers using ASP.NET Core.
aspnetaspasp-netnet-coreaspnet-core
dotnet/docs
Jun 2016 - Jan 2023
This repository contains .NET Documentation.
Role in this project:Technical Writer
Technical WriterContributions:1592 reviews, 664 commits, 1804 PRs in 6 years 8 months
Contributions summary:Tom contributed documentation and examples for .NET, particularly focusing on character encoding, JSON serialization, and System.CommandLine. The commits include adding new articles with code snippets illustrating how to approach character encoding, examples on how to handle different types of values, and creating a tutorial on System.CommandLine. Furthermore, the user provided detailed examples with related code and the code differences.
dotnetfsharpvisual-basiccsharpdotnet-core
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