Anna Herlihy
Doctoral Student at EPFL (École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne)
Lausanne, Vaud, Switzerland
Summary
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Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolAnna Herlihy is a doctoral student at EPFL researching the intersection of programming languages and databases, co-advised by Anastasia Ailamaki and Martin Odersky. With 11 years of industry experience, she previously served as a staff software engineer at MongoDB where she worked across the Python driver, Compass GUI, and developer tooling. Her open-source contributions include substantive compiler work on the Scala 3 (Dotty) project—improving type checking, error explanations and code generation—and reliability and test improvements across major MongoDB client projects. She combines deep systems and language knowledge with practical backend and test-automation expertise, often surfacing subtle correctness and usability issues. Based in Lausanne, Anna’s current research on metaprogramming and Datalog reflects a rare blend of production-grade engineering experience and rigorous academic inquiry.
11 years of coding experience
7 years of employment as a software developer
Computer Science Sc.B, Computer Science Sc.B at Brown University
English, Swedish, French
Github Skills (36)
pymongo10
unit-testing10
javascript10
back-end-development10
python10
testing10
database-administration10
mongodb-database10
scala10
dotty10
type-system10
compiler-compiler10
compiler-construction10
compiler10
test-integration10
Programming languages (13)
Github contributions (5)
mongodb-js/compass
Jul 2016 - Apr 2021
The GUI for MongoDB.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer & Database Engineer
Back-end Developer & Database EngineerContributions:627 commits, 4 PRs, 8 pushes in 4 years 10 months
Contributions summary:Anna contributed significantly to the `mongodb-js/compass` repository, implementing server statistics features and database interaction capabilities. Their work involved creating current operation and server status functionalities, as well as integrating top command functionalities within the data service, which enhanced the GUI's interaction with MongoDB. The user also refactored existing data service code, adding features like a time-based view of data for the UI.
mongodbgui
yougov/mongo-connector
Jan 2016 - Apr 2016
MongoDB data stream pipeline tools by YouGov (adopted from MongoDB)
Role in this project:Back-end Developer & Test Automation Engineer
Back-end Developer & Test Automation EngineerContributions:3 releases, 20 commits, 15 PRs in 3 months
Contributions summary:Anna primarily focused on updating and maintaining the `mongo-connector` project, upgrading PyMongo and making changes to the test suite to address race conditions. They refactored code to improve test reliability, including making `self._fields` a set. Furthermore, the user fixed bugs and added support for SOLR, and worked on excluding fields in the documents. They made version bumps and configuration changes to existing tests.
data-streammongodb
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