# Michael Smith > Software Engineer • I take care of complex state modeling so you don’t have to Location: Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States Profile: https://flows.cv/michaelsmith1 Engineer who takes projects over the finish line. Lead Developer for Coder's official plugin in Spotify Backstage. Main developer for rebooting the Coder Registry into an open-source ecosystem (3x contributions and +15M downloads in 2025). I specialize in complex state management for React/TypeScript UIs, and concurrent systems in Go. I love taking highly technical domains and making them approachable to any kind of user – the internet should be for everyone. If you have any frontend or fullstack roles that solve interesting problems (particularly in spaces involving visual/graphic design, education, or climate tech), my inbox is always open. Feel free to connect on LinkedIn or GitHub. Previous talks: • Buttery-Smooth UIs with React Transitions and Deferred Rendering · 2025 – Sponsored by Sentry and Supabase • Coder with Backstage: The Missing Link in Developer Productivity · 2024 – Given for platformengineering.org GitHub: https://github.com/buenos-nachos ## Work Experience ### Software Engineer – Core Team, North America Region @ Coder Jan 2023 – Present | Austin, Texas, United States • Served as Lead Developer for Coder’s client SDK in Spotify’s Backstage platform, unlocking sales for over ten Fortune 500 companies, and driving a ~20% increase in marketing seminar attendance in H1 2024. • Led the reboot of the Coder Registry, turning a mostly internal tool into an open-source ecosystem for publishing plugins, tripling user contributions and boosting total plugin downloads by 15 million in 2025. • Co-led rewrite for the Coder Registry Terraform Server, delivering full rewrite for critical infrastructure in two months. Improved server availability from ~93% in late 2024 to +99.99% in all of 2025. • Reviewed résumés, graded take-homes, and interviewed 60+ mid-level and senior engineers over 20 months; was unanimously nominated to design rubrics and code challenges for first-ever staff-level frontend engineers. • Acted as Code Owner for flagship product’s frontend, guiding open-source contributors and four global teams on UI engineering best practices. Reduced turnaround time for frontend PRs by ~2 days in Q3 2025. • Rewrote data-fetching layer into dependency-injectable UI client, cutting test flakes in half though improved state isolation, and streamlining the API vendoring process for Backstage and Coder’s VSCode plugin. • Owned implementations and test suites for state management in the flagship frontend, designing well-tested, type-safe tools for WebSocket message parsing, pagination prefetching, and Go-to-TypeScript SSR hydration. • Provided consulting to design team and brand agencies for UI mockups for dashboards and marketing sites; stopped 40+ mobile UI edge cases and WCAG Level AA violations from reaching the implementation stage. • Mentored and oversaw Coder’s first intern, ensuring all feature work was completed on time in Q3 2025. ### Software Engineer @ CS Engineering Jan 2022 – Jan 2022 | New York, New York, United States • Migrated critical files in ed tech platform to TypeScript, delivering updates two months ahead of schedule. • Designed new state management strategies in the React codebase, allowing components to opt into mutation-based UI updates decoupled from React’s render cycles, boosting average performance by over 40%. • Wrote articles and guidelines for TypeScript best practices as part of codebase migration. Provided concrete examples of how to avoid unsafe behaviors and maximize V8 engine performance. • Wrote technical articles for junior developers, covering topics like environment setup and the key concepts around request caching. ### Software Engineer – Data Department, Central Office @ MOM's Organic Market Jan 2020 – Jan 2022 | Rockville, Maryland, United States • Built BigQuery pipelines for product catalogs. Automated four-hour cleaning processes for datasets with 100k+ items into reproducible, two-second tasks, while reducing missing data fields by 45% for accurate reporting. • Rewrote legacy scripts into Google Apps Script, increasing the performance for fuzzy matching, data querying, and automated reporting by +400%, and improving integrations with in-house JavaScript tooling. • Worked on a broker management tool in Angular, creating various components for the in-house design system, and wrote algorithms for modeling rapidly-changing broker relationships. • Codified formal guidelines for doing code reviews, raising average ZenDesk SLA ticket compliance by 28%. ### Buyer – Wellness Department @ MOM's Organic Market Jan 2018 – Jan 2020 | Waldorf, MD • Created Python scripts for generating low-stock inventory reports, slashing overstock and out-of-stock counts for the department by an average of 5% per period. • Created a UI for cross-referencing shelf tags against inventory backstock to identify which items could be stocked out, speeding up the process for replacing inventory by an average of 2 employee hours per day. • Performed inventory audits to reconcile backstock against database inventory counts, addressing variances in inventory value by a minimum of $10,000 per audit. Accomplishments • Most profitable wellness department in the company in 2019. • Most profitable store in the company in 2019. ## Education ### Computer Engineering University of Maryland Baltimore County ## Contact & Social - LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/buenos-nachos --- Source: https://flows.cv/michaelsmith1 JSON Resume: https://flows.cv/michaelsmith1/resume.json Last updated: 2026-03-29