Michael Irwin
Principal Software Engineer, Developer Success at Virginia Tech
Blacksburg, Virginia, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolMichael Irwin is a Principal Software Engineer and developer advocate with 14 years of experience building developer tooling, automation, and declarative systems, currently leading Developer Success at Docker. He blends hands-on engineering—contributing front-end, back-end, and DevOps improvements to widely used Docker projects like play-with-docker and getting-started—with teaching and mentorship as an adjunct instructor at Virginia Tech. Michael excels at lowering barriers to entry for complex tooling through clear documentation, UX-focused enhancements, and resilient infrastructure fixes. A former platform lead and long-time Docker meetup organizer, he pairs product-minded leadership with practical implementation experience. Outside of work he balances community-building and family life in Blacksburg, often speaking at conferences and running workshops that translate DevOps concepts into approachable learning.
14 years of coding experience
17 years of employment as a software developer
Master of Engineering - MEng Computer Science, Master of Engineering - MEng Computer Science at Virginia Tech
Stackoverflow
1,787reputation
314kreached
37answers
11questions
iframe
top-5%
drupal
top-5%
jquery
top-5%
jquery-ui
top-5%
Github Skills (25)
javascript10
docker10
mysql10
css10
ui-design10
dockers10
uid10
front-end-development10
angularjs10
build-automation10
html10
jquery9
drupal9
playgrounds9
nodejs9
Programming languages (24)
Github contributions (5)
dockersamples/101-tutorial
Oct 2019 - Jan 2023
Role in this project:
Full-stack Developer
Full-stack DeveloperContributions:37 commits, 11 PRs, 21 pushes in 3 years 3 months
Contributions summary:Michael primarily contributed to front-end and infrastructure aspects of the project. They implemented an easter egg using JavaScript and jQuery, and updated the UI with Docker branding and a Docker Labs logo. They also integrated a multi-lingual build process, modifying the build scripts and configuration files to support multiple languages. Additionally, the user added a test run to the build script and made changes to the docker-compose configuration.
docker/getting-started
Feb 2020 - Jan 2023
Getting started with Docker
Role in this project:Backend & DevOps Engineer
Backend & DevOps EngineerContributions:3 reviews, 47 commits, 72 PRs in 2 years 11 months
Contributions summary:Michael contributed to bug fixes and upgrades within the Docker getting-started repository. Their work included fixing import paths, upgrading database packages, and modifying the Dockerfile to run tests correctly. Furthermore, they added a timeout for DNS query failures in the MySQL handler, improving the system's resilience to connection issues. The user also merged a branch related to documentation improvements.
docker
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