Zack Kitzmiller
Founding Partner at Thoughtful Products
Chicago, Illinois, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolZack Kitzmiller is a founding partner and seasoned engineering leader with 16 years building fault-tolerant, high-traffic distributed systems, particularly in payments and retail IoT. He has led architecture and resilience efforts at companies like SeatGeek and Grabango, designing payment, fraud, and marketplace systems that processed billions in transactions and scaled to hundreds of thousands of ops per minute. Comfortable across Elixir, Go, Python and Swift (and fluent in legacy stacks like PHP/RoR), he blends hands-on backend work with cloud and Kubernetes infrastructure design. An active open-source contributor, he helped shape popular projects like the Sixpack A/B testing framework and improved Go middleware in negroni, reflecting a focus on pragmatic, reusable tooling. Based in Chicago, he pairs product-oriented engineering with a hardware-hacking curiosity and a habit of building delightfully unnecessary side projects.
16 years of coding experience
14 years of employment as a software developer
Computer Science, Computer Science at Northern Illinois University
English, go, python, ruby
Github Skills (14)
api-rest10
rest-api10
error-handling10
middleware10
go10
api10
python10
redis10
restful-api10
api-design9
flask-ask9
flask9
apidoc9
apim9
Programming languages (14)
Github contributions (5)
sixpack/sixpack
Jan 2013 - Nov 2017
Sixpack is a language-agnostic a/b-testing framework
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:1 review, 451 commits, 36 PRs in 4 years 11 months
Contributions summary:Zack primarily worked on implementing and structuring the core functionalities of the Sixpack A/B testing framework. This involved creating models for experiments and alternatives, setting up a database connection using Redis, and developing API endpoints for participating in and converting users. The user's contributions also include laying out a basic web interface and the overall structure.
testing-frameworka-b-testingagnostictestinglanguage-agnostic
urfave/negroni
Oct 2014 - May 2016
Idiomatic HTTP Middleware for Golang
Role in this project:Backend Developer
Backend DeveloperContributions:8 commits, 1 PR, 6 comments in 1 year 7 months
Contributions summary:Zack focused on enhancing the error handling and overall functionality of the Negroni middleware. They added an `ErrorHandlerFunc` for custom error handling, allowing for more flexible response customization. Key changes involved modifying the `recovery.go` file to incorporate the new error handling mechanism and updating the `negroni.go` file to support additional handler functions. The user also improved the library's structure.
golangidiomatichttp-routermicroframeworkhttp-middleware
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