Garrett Heel
Software Engineer at Figma
San Francisco, California, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolGarrett Heel is a seasoned software engineer with 14 years of experience building backend systems, developer infrastructure, and cloud orchestration across companies like Figma, Notion, and Lyft. He has deep AWS and production-performance experience, having worked on cloud orchestration, developer infrastructure, and performance testing at scale. An active open-source contributor, Garrett has improved key Python projects such as PynamoDB and moto—refactoring core model behavior and hardening AWS service mocks—plus DevOps fixes in graphite-beacon. He blends pragmatic engineering with strong attention to maintainability and testing, often tackling legacy code and subtle edge cases (Unicode, attribute handling) that quietly improve reliability. Based in New York, he pairs product-focused delivery with a history of improving documentation, build processes, and developer workflows.
14 years of coding experience
13 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor of Multimedia Design Software Engineering, Bachelor of Multimedia Design Software Engineering at The University of Queensland
Stackoverflow
23reputation
311reached
0answers
1question
Github Skills (23)
boto10
python10
testing10
tornado10
graphite10
object-oriented-programming10
amazon-dynamodb10
dynamodb10
aws10
mocking10
api-design9
documentation8
amazon-ec28
yaml8
json8
Programming languages (11)
Github contributions (5)
pynamodb/PynamoDB
Jan 2017 - Oct 2022
A pythonic interface to Amazon's DynamoDB
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:20 releases, 125 reviews, 64 commits in 5 years 10 months
Contributions summary:Garrett primarily focused on refactoring and improving the PynamoDB library's core functionalities. Their work involved removing and replacing legacy features, such as `AttributeDict`, and ensuring that default values are respected within `MapAttribute`. They made significant changes to model behavior and attribute handling to improve clarity and maintainability. Additionally, the user updated examples, documentation and corrected release notes.
dynamodbpythonaws
klen/graphite-beacon
Jun 2015 - Dec 2016
Simple alerting system for Graphite metrics
Role in this project:Back-end Developer & DevOps Engineer
Back-end Developer & DevOps EngineerContributions:31 commits, 41 PRs, 70 pushes in 1 year 6 months
Contributions summary:Garrett primarily contributed to bug fixes and improvements within the `graphite-beacon` project. They addressed issues related to metric fetching, HipChat handler functionality, and test failures. Additionally, the user made changes to the project's build process and dependencies by bumping the version and upgrading tornado. Further contributions included incorporating pylint and pep8 tests.
alertinggrafanagraphitemetricsmonitoring
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