Zim Kalinowski
Founder at SmarterCode
Florence, Tuscany, Italy
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolZim Kalinowski is a founder and seasoned embedded systems and cloud engineer with over a decade of experience building developer-focused tools and IoT solutions. He combines low-level expertise—from 6502 assembly and FreeRTOS work on ESP-IDF—to high-level Azure service design, having driven autogeneration tooling for Azure CLI, Python SDK and Ansible that dramatically improved test coverage and API quality. As IDF Core Manager at Espressif and a Senior SDE at Microsoft, he bridged device constraints and cloud connectivity, prototyping Cortex-M IoT devices and influencing core Azure networking internals. A top contributor to Ansible and active in widely used projects like FreeRTOS, he cares deeply about developer experience and reproducible APIs. Based in Florence, he now leads SmarterCode, focusing on VSCode extensions, CLI and API autogeneration—continuing a career thread that began with his startup SmarterPhone, later acquired by Nokia.
10 years of coding experience
28 years of employment as a software developer
Master of Science (MSc) mathematics, Master of Science (MSc) mathematics at Uniwersytet Marii Curie-Skłodowskiej w Lublinie
Stackoverflow
21reputation
2kreached
2answers
0questions
Github Skills (10)
c1710
freertos10
esp-idf10
embedded10
rtos10
c1110
sys10
documentation10
cprogramming-language8
esp326
Programming languages (14)
Github contributions (5)
espressif/esp-idf
Aug 2021 - Dec 2022
Espressif IoT Development Framework. Official development framework for Espressif SoCs.
Role in this project:
Embedded Systems Engineer / IoT Developer
Embedded Systems Engineer / IoT DeveloperContributions:5 reviews, 36 commits, 5 PRs in 1 year 3 months
Contributions summary:Zim's commits primarily involve modifications to the FreeRTOS kernel within the ESP-IDF framework, indicating work focused on embedded systems development. These changes include bug fixes related to coroutine scheduling and missing semicolons in driver components. The user also made documentation improvements and performed upgrades to the FreeRTOS version, enhancing the system's stability and maintainability. Further commits reveal code layout changes and test adjustments within the FreeRTOS kernel, demonstrating a focus on optimizing the framework for the Espressif SoCs.
espressifdevelopment-frameworkesp-idfiotesp32
FreeRTOS/FreeRTOS-Kernel
Aug 2021 - Sep 2021
FreeRTOS kernel files only, submoduled into https://github.com/FreeRTOS/FreeRTOS and various other repos.
Role in this project:Technical Writer
Technical WriterContributions:1 review, 5 commits, 6 PRs in 26 days
Contributions summary:Zim primarily focused on improving the repository's documentation. They fixed parameter names in the documentation, corrected documentation in the queue, and replaced `<pre>` tags with `@code{c}` tags throughout the code, ensuring proper formatting and code examples. Their work demonstrates a focus on clarity and accuracy within the documentation. They also made minor fixes in the stream buffer documentation.
kernelwindows-driverlinuxfreertos-kernelfreertos
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