hello, i'm ~vilmibm

nate smith | he/they | nateksmith @ pm dot me | home page | microblog

I have been trading code for money since 2005. I prioritize maintainable, readable code and friendly, empathetic software development. I'm cautious to adopt new technology without extensive research and reflection. I believe that computing can be liberatory. I think computers should be used to make emotionally compelling and beautiful things.

So let's do that together.

Professional History

Internet Archive

11/2023 - present. Senior Software Engineer

• Member of Archiving & Digital Services
• Leading engineering on IA Scholar

GitHub

2/2018 - 8/2023. Senior Software Engineer

• Go, GraphQL, Ruby, Rails
• Co-author and a maintainer of the GitHub CLI
• Involved in the CLI project from the beginning, helping shape it both technologically and culturally as it grew to 100k monthly users
• I believe strongly in tech accessibility along axes of ability, economics, and bandwidth and have put these values into my CLI work
• I've done UX and product work in addition to being an engineering lead
• I have performed extensive community management as co-maintainer of this major open source project
• Prior to the CLI team I was tech lead and briefly the manager of work on an internal Rails-based tool for managing Enterprise billing

Venmo

8/2016 - 12/2017. Member of Technical Staff

• Python, Django, Tornado, MySQL, Redis, MongoDB, New Relic, Sumologic, Sentry
• Tasked with rewriting identity verification, notification, and email systems
• Led emergency initiatives for complying with audit requests and mitigating payment outages
• Architected a zero-downtime major migration of our Redis infrastructure

Puppet, inc

5/2013 - 8/2016. Software Engineer

• Clojure, Java, Ruby, PostgreSQL, jgit
• Developed Puppet Enterprise's RBAC implementation, managing architecture design, coding, and junior developers
• Wrote puppetdb-ruby, an open source Ruby client for the PuppetDB API
• Contributed to jgit-based file storage in puppetserver
• Implemented X.509 based inter-node security layer for Puppet Server deployments
• Contributed to Trapper Keeper, an open source service manager for Clojure

Cox Media Group, Digital

1/2011 - 4/2013. Lead Developer

• Python, PostgreSQL, Django, JavaScript (browse/NodeJS), New Relic
• Rewrote advertising system (front+backend), reducing page load time by 20 seconds
• Wrote and open sourced a framework for semi-realtime front-end widgets used for comments, ads, and other features
• Wrote lazythumbs, an open source, high performance thumbnail processing service for Django
• Scaled a Django app and its PostgreSQL database to handle millions of hits a day
• Trained staff on JavaScript best practices; introduced JS unit testing with a custom node library

Summersault, LLC

5/2009 - 12/2010. Web Application Developer

• Perl, PostgreSQL, CGI::Application
• Led development of customized RSS feeds for pet searches on Adopt-A-Pet
• Led development of adoptable pet photo gallery tool for animal shelters
• Helped institute Summersault's first use of cloud technology (EC2)

Earlham College

9/07 - 12/09. Workstudy programmer

• Perl, PHP, Oracle DB
• Maintained Earlham's in-house course registration system
• Mentored younger students on web application development

IBM

Summer 2008. Pre-Professional Intern

• Python, C, Ganglia, z/VM
• Developed a prototype hypervisor monitoring tool in C and Python

Mid-Hudson Library System

2005-2006. Web Development Intern

• HTML, CSS, Flash, PHP
• Managed the web sites for around 60 libraries systemwide
• Introduced the system's first use of PHP
• Developed Flash tutorials for obtaining and using library cards

Volunteer Experience

https://tilde.town - 2014 - now. Founder/admin

• Social media was making me feel bad and I wanted to hang out inside a computer
• I founded a social linux server as a safe, non-commercial place to digitally hang out
• I have worked to foster a creative, inclusive, mutually supportive community
• I do moderation, mentorship, and administration with the help of a few volunteers
• We've signed up over 4,000 accounts since inception

Django Girls PDX - 2015 - 2017. Organizer/tutor

• Co-organized the majority of DGPDX's six workshops, managing fundraising and event logistics.
• Wrote the Chromebook section of the Django Girls Tutorial, ensuring attendees to any Django Girls workshop around the world could get setup to code with ChromeOS.
• Coached at multiple events, teaching programming fundamentals and web concepts to groups of 3-4 women new to programming.
• Delivered short lectures on HTTP basics and Web history

Code For Good - 2017. Organizer

• Co-organized a volunteer event pairing software engineers with local non-profits
• Met with a number of local non-profits to determine what their needs were
• Architect and project manager for three non-profits' Django projects

Education

• Bachelors in Computer Science, Earlham College. Graduated with honors 2009.
• Recipient of Charles A. Frueauff Award for Creativity in Computer Science.
• Certificate in Poetry, Independent Publishers Resource Center. Completed 2016.

Talks and Publications

• ongoing: my youtube channel where I post demos and explainers for the GitHub CLI among other things
• 2016, PyDX: Python Performance Primer
• 2016, PyDX: Generative Tarot with Python
• 2015, PyDX: Generating Poetry with Python
• 2015, Clojure/West: Introduction to Trapperkeeper
• 2013, American Circus: Prosaic: A New Approach to Computer Poetry
• 2016, self-published: Save Scum: poetry cut-up from game FAQs
• 2015, self-published: Cyberpunk Prophecies: poetry cut-up from Cyberpunk novels

Projects

(see https://github.com/vilmibm for more)

• tilde.town (Ubuntu, Puppet, AWS). A social Linux server with thousands of accounts. As the primary admin, I automate system tasks and foster empathetic community.
• blackout poetry engine (Go, HTML, Javascript). Poetry authoring tool using 9,000,000 chunks of text I ingested from Project Gutenberg
• prosaic (Python, NLTK, postgresql). Prose analyzer and poetry generation software.
• town (Go, Bash). A suite of command line tools for managing tilde.town.
• hermeticum (Go). An in-progress rewrite of tildemush, a scritable multiplayer text-based virtual world, in Go
• tildemush (Python, postgresql). Scriptable multiplayer text-based virtual world. Designed and Implemented pedagogically oriented scripting langauge, WITCH.
• gh-screensaver (Go). A collection of animated ASCII art "screensavers."
• trapperkeeper-authorization (Clojure, OpenSSL). Contributed X.509 based node authorization.
• puppetdb-ruby (Ruby, PuppetDB). Original author, but no longer maintainer.
• murepl (Clojure). A multiuser Clojure REPL that doubles as a MUD.
• nodeunit-b (Node.js). Unit testing framework that uses jsdom to run JS tests outside of a browser.
• marimo / django-marimo (Javascript, Python). A framework for semi-realtime widgets.

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