Alison Maher
Principal Software Engineer at Microsoft
Seattle, Washington, United States
Summary
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Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolAlison Maher is a Principal Software Engineer based in Seattle with 7 years of experience building web platform features and accessibility improvements for Chromium as part of Microsoft Edge. She combines hands-on engineering in CSS, layout, and accessibility with leadership experience—formerly managing the Chromium Web Platform team and now driving technical direction as a principal engineer. Alison contributes to high-profile open-source projects like the Chromium mirror and web-platform-tests, where her work on accessibility object models and forced-colors CSS behavior demonstrates both low-level systems thinking and standards-minded testing. Her background spans full-stack platform development and process improvement dating back to internships where she shipped web features and automated business workflows. She is an active member of the W3C CSS Working Group, bringing practical browser implementation insights to standards development. Colleagues value her for balancing meticulous code-level changes with pragmatic product-focused prioritization.
7 years of coding experience
8 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor's degree, Computer Science, Bachelor's degree, Computer Science at University of Washington
Github Skills (22)
accessibility10
debugging10
debug10
c-language10
acc10
accessibilityservice10
testing10
css10
chromium10
web-standards10
acessibility10
webtest10
cprogramming-language10
test-automation10
web-testing10
Programming languages (8)
Github contributions (5)
web-platform-tests/wpt
Jun 2019 - Jan 2023
Test suites for Web platform specs — including WHATWG, W3C, and others
Role in this project:
Front-end Developer & Test Automation Engineer
Front-end Developer & Test Automation EngineerContributions:186 commits, 3 comments, 1 issue in 3 years 8 months
Contributions summary:Alison primarily contributed to the testing and implementation of new features related to the CSS-related specifications within the WPT repository. The user implemented and tested the "forced-colors" media query and CSS property, including related tests to ensure its proper functionality. They also made significant changes to the handling of SVG elements in forced colors mode, updating relevant tests for these scenarios.
microsoft-edgetest-runnerspecssafarifirefox
chromium/chromium
Oct 2019 - Jan 2023
The official GitHub mirror of the Chromium source
Role in this project:Backend Developer
Backend DeveloperContributions:25 commits in 3 years 2 months
Contributions summary:Alison's commits primarily involve modifications to the Accessibility (AX) object model within the Chromium source code. They are making changes to how cached attribute values are updated and managed. The user is also adding and modifying code related to tree update mechanisms, including new update reasons and debugging tools, indicating a focus on improving the accessibility features of the browser. Furthermore, the commits suggest an understanding of the build system and potential performance issues related to accessibility within the browser.
chromiumgithub-mirrorchrome
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