Betsy Mcphail
Staff R&D Engineer at Kitware Inc.
New York, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolBetsy Mcphail is a Staff R&D Engineer in New York with 11 years of professional engineering experience and a background in computer engineering (Union College, RPI). She excels in cross-platform build systems, DevOps, and backend automation—contributing significant fixes and features to high-profile open-source projects like Spack and CMake that improved Windows compatibility, test handling, and memory-defect reporting. At Kitware she advanced build stability and tooling for complex scientific and robotics codebases, and earlier work spans low-level C/C++ and Python applications for both Linux and Windows. Known for pragmatic problem solving, she combines deep build-system expertise with careful documentation and testing to make difficult integrations reproducible and maintainable.
12 years of coding experience
17 years of employment as a software developer
BS, Computer Engineering, Math minor, BS, Computer Engineering, Math minor at Union CollegeMaster of Engineering, Computer Engineering, Master of Engineering, Computer Engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
Github Skills (28)
filesystem10
c-language10
python10
scripting10
file-manipulation10
testing10
windows10
build-system10
cmake10
windows-xp10
ubuntu10
system10
sys10
bazel10
fileio10
Programming languages (12)
Github contributions (5)
RobotLocomotion/drake
Oct 2016 - Jan 2023
Model-based design and verification for robotics.
Role in this project:
Backend Developer & DevOps Engineer
Backend Developer & DevOps EngineerContributions:395 reviews, 207 commits, 412 PRs in 6 years 4 months
Contributions summary:Betsy primarily contributed to the setup and maintenance of the Drake robotics project's build and installation scripts, specifically for Ubuntu 16.04. They focused on installing and configuring prerequisites, including Clang, CMake, and Bazel. Their work also involved improving the build process, incorporating support for Gurobi on OS X, and adding documentation updates. These changes were crucial for ensuring the project's build stability and cross-platform compatibility.
roboticsdrake
Kitware/CMake
Mar 2015 - Sep 2021
Mirror of CMake upstream repository
Role in this project:Backend Developer
Backend DeveloperContributions:55 commits in 6 years 7 months
Contributions summary:Betsy primarily focused on enhancing the ctest functionality within the CMake build system. They implemented a new `DEFECT_COUNT` option for `ctest_memcheck` to capture memory defect counts. They also added a `DISABLED` test property, improving the handling of tests that are not run and added support for subproject timing summaries. Furthermore, the user improved the documentation and added tests for the new features.
cmake
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