What I’m Building & Learning
Projects, experiments, and code that reflect my journey tackling engineering challenges and mentoring teams.
Walker Smith | Engineering Leader
10 years specializing in front end architecture and distributed systems serving 2 billion customers.
View resumeRead blogI build across the stack, scale systems that last, and dive deep into ML — because staying sharp means never standing still.
A sandbox of code where I test ideas, sharpen my craft, and explore new technologies.
Browse lessonsMy research aims to contribute to the evolving field of machine learning.
Browse publicationsSee what powers my dev flow: tools, themes, gear, and shortcuts I can't live without.
View developer workbenchExplore classic design patterns through focused, self-contained examples.
Explore examplesHear directly from those who've worked alongside me — from cross-functional peers to executive stakeholders. These testimonials reflect a track record of technical leadership, mentorship, and driving scalable solutions across complex systems. Each speaks to the impact, collaboration, and trust built throughout my engineering career.
Browse allWalker has always been a force-multiplying addition to any team; he's passionate about software development as a craft, with a continuous improvement (growth) mindset – and broadcasts a high-energy creative vibe that's super infectious.
Aside from epic architecture, design & coding talent, Walker's a natural, persuasive leader, and an excellent coach and driver of the adoption of new technology and practices.
And importantly, he gets a ton of sh** done, while continuously seeking better ways to get far better sh** done, in better time.
I am so grateful for the years we worked together – I feel that we learned a great deal from each other.
Walker is an outstanding engineer, team player, and leader. His natural curiosity for technology is just contagious.
I’ll miss working with you, Walker, but have no doubt some lucky team will bring you on to help make a dent in their part of the universe.
If anyone asks for a reference, send them my way!
I had the pleasure of working closely with Walker, and I can confidently say he exemplifies what it means to be an impactful engineering leader. Walker has a deep understanding of developer experience and a rare ability to balance technical excellence with people-first leadership.
He doesn't just lead teams—he empowers them to thrive by identifying high-leverage improvements in tooling, testing, and workflows that drive real efficiency and quality. Whether he's mentoring engineers, aligning stakeholders, or guiding devex strategy, Walker brings clarity, empathy, and relentless focus on outcomes.
Any team would be lucky to have him at the helm.
I worked with Walker some years back at VersionOne (Digital.ai) on several projects within the same team. Walker in my mind is a visionary in many ways in that he is looking at not only the big picture but the future as well, cognizant of both where the company strategy stands and what efficiencies and improves his contributions can make down the road. THIS is the type of developer you want not only coding but also leading other developers in your company.
In addition, Walker is both engaging and proactive in team building, activities and practices. He pushes those around him to excel more and brings the quality of work up overall. I do not hesitate to recommend Walker as a valuable addition to any software team he pursues.
Projects, experiments, and code that reflect my journey tackling engineering challenges and mentoring teams.
I write about building thoughtful systems, writing maintainable code, and solving real-world engineering problems at scale.
Browse articlesLarge language models are impressive out of the box—but when your CMS powers content written by hundreds of people for a global audience, accuracy and voice consistency aren't optional. Pretrained knowledge wasn't enough. We needed context. Real context.
Cache invalidation is hard — but what if it didn't have to be? We slashed content latency by 99% without ripping out our CDN, and in the process, built a real-time publishing system that unlocked dashboards, workflows, and trust across teams.
Billions of readers. Hundreds of writers. One shared content platform. How we balanced editorial precision and platform-scale delivery by evolving our CMS architecture with CQRS and federated GraphQL, improving editor experience and system scalability.
Help articles served in flagship products struggled with performance due to runtime rendering and content complexity. Here's how we applied static generation—at scale—to improve reliability, responsiveness, and SEO.
I have given talks at React-ATL, lead hands-on workshops at Connect.Tech, and make small contributions to open source projects that make the web better—one pull request at a time.
4K+ member group. Presented to audience of 50+ engineers, covering functional programming and facilitating community-driven discussion.
View presentationConducted a hands-on workshop on Redux at Connect.Tech, a major industry conference, training 50+ engineers in state management best practices and real-world application design.
View workshopConributions to Cypress.io, JsonEditor, Kafdrop, react-treeview, developer-icons, VersionOne SDKs, VersionOne Component Library and more.
View contributionsCore member and admin of Discord community of 50+ engineers focused on software craftsmanship, leading code jams, show & tells, resume reviews, and peer mentorship.
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I worked on this massive content platform at Microsoft — basically the system behind all the docs and help pages. It handled publishing, localization into 64 languages, and had hundreds of thousands of assets. Served billions of hits a month.
At Digital.ai, I worked on a platform that brought software planning and release automation together — kind of full lifecycle management for enterprise development. One of the big things I built was a webhooks system that let teams integrate with their existing tools. It ended up being used by about half of the Fortune 500, which was rewarding to see in action.
At Smash.gg, a startup focused on making grassroots esports tournaments truly matter, I helped lead the shift from in-person events to online competitions — right when the world was changing fast. That pivot repositioned us as a market leader and opened up a major new revenue stream that fueled the company’s growth.
Back when it was still VersionOne (before becoming Digital.ai), I helped get their new release automation product off the ground. It was a big deal because it expanded the platform beyond just planning into actual DevOps tooling. That shift really widened the scope of what the company could offer and set the stage for deeper end-to-end software lifecycle management.
