Wendell Smith
Staff Software Engineer at Datadog
New York, New York, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolWendell Smith is a Staff Software Engineer in New York with 16 years of experience specializing in performance, scaling, and distributed systems for high-volume, low-latency data. He leads and architects metrics query systems at Datadog, drawing on a physics PhD background to bring rigorous numeric thinking and custom simulation-grade tooling to production engineering. His open-source contributions span both Python and Rust ecosystems — including modernizing the urwid console UI for Python 3 and improving documentation and clarity in the Glommio async runtime — showing a pragmatic habit of improving developer ergonomics as well as runtime performance. Comfortable across C++, Python, Rust, and large-scale distributed architectures, he often applies scientific workflows (parallel simulations, terabyte-scale data processing) to production problems in observability and telemetry.
16 years of coding experience
5 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor's degree, Physics, Bachelor's degree, Physics at Dartmouth CollegeDoctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.), Physics, Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.), Physics at Yale University
English, German
Github Skills (16)
text-rendering10
io-uring10
terminal-emulator10
rust10
terminal-application10
emulation10
python10
async10
unicode10
documentation9
multiplatform9
widgets9
web-widgets9
cross-platform9
compatible9
Programming languages (13)
Github contributions (5)
DataDog/glommio
Nov 2020 - Nov 2020
Glommio is a thread-per-core crate that makes writing highly parallel asynchronous applications in a thread-per-core architecture easier for rustaceans.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:6 reviews, 13 commits, 1 PR in 4 days
Contributions summary:Wendell contributed to the `glommio` library, focusing on code enhancements and documentation improvements. Their work involved adding comments to explain weak references within the executor, clarifying the design of the code. The user also added documentation to the crate's lib.rs file, explaining the crate's purpose, async support, and scheduling mechanisms. Further, they corrected the documentation and added more links to the documentation.
thread-per-corecrateasynchronousparallelrust
urwid/urwid
May 2010 - Aug 2010
Console user interface library for Python (official repo)
Role in this project:Full-stack Developer
Full-stack DeveloperContributions:17 commits, 1 comment in 2 months
Contributions summary:Wendell primarily focused on modernizing the `urwid` library for Python 3 compatibility. Their work involved porting existing code, including key files like `testurwid.py`, `font.py`, and `raw_display.py`, to be compatible with Python 3. They also addressed bug fixes and made improvements to various widgets and functionalities, such as editing components and canvas rendering. Further contribution included updates to handle text layout and terminal emulation.
user-interfacepythonconsole
Find and Hire Top DevelopersWe’ve analyzed the programming source code of over 60 million software developers on GitHub and scored them by 50,000 skills. Sign-up on Prog,AI to search for software developers.