Alex Hochheiden
Senior Software Engineer at Mozilla
Greater Vancouver Metropolitan Area Canada
Summary
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Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolAlex Hochheiden is a Senior Software Engineer based in Greater Vancouver with 11 years of experience building and optimizing complex systems, currently contributing to Mozilla’s Firefox build and developer tooling. He has deep expertise in build systems, dependency management, and performance optimization—demonstrated by significant build-time reductions, migration of critical database layers, and modernizing large open-source Python codebases such as the gecko-dev repository. At MDA he cut startup times and dramatically improved ingest and build performance, and at Mozilla he modernized vendoring and dependency workflows while improving logging and documentation for a globally used project. Known for pragmatic refactors and measurable engineering impact, he combines strong hands-on coding with mentoring and triage of high-impact issues in large, distributed codebases.
11 years of coding experience
5 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor of Science, Computer Science, Bachelor of Science, Computer Science at The University of Lethbridge
English, German, French
Stackoverflow
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Github Skills (9)
dependency-management10
build-system10
virtual-environment10
python10
pytest8
githubaction-workflow7
testing7
github-ci7
cicd6
Programming languages (9)
Github contributions (5)
mozilla/gecko-dev
Oct 2021 - Dec 2022
SUPERSEDED by https://github.com/mozilla-firefox/firefox. Read-only Git mirror of the Mercurial gecko repositories at https://hg.mozilla.org
Role in this project:
Full-stack Developer
Full-stack DeveloperContributions:121 commits in 1 year 2 months
Contributions summary:Alex primarily contributed to the codebase by refactoring and updating the project's Python dependencies. They replaced deprecated functions and libraries, such as `distutils.spawn.find_executable` and `distutils.util.strtobool`, with modern alternatives like `shutil.which` and custom implementations. They also modernized the vendoring process, replacing `poetry` with `uv`, and implemented features for dependency management, including adding, removing, and upgrading packages, while also addressing potential issues with the site's virtual environment. The user's contributions also included build system updates, improvements to logging, and documentation enhancements.
firefoxgit-mirrormercurialmozilla-firefox
CPSC3780/Command-Line-Chat-Client-Server
Oct 2016 - Nov 2016
Contributions:26 commits, 41 PRs, 73 pushes in 1 month
cppcommand-line-interfacechatlinuxandroid
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