Bill Avery - Principal Software Engineer at Microsoft

Bill Avery

Principal Software Engineer at Microsoft

Redmond, Washington, United States

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Summary

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Rockstar

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Top School

Bill Avery is a Principal Software Engineer with nine years of recent experience and a long tenure at Microsoft, based in Redmond, Washington. He specializes in back-end C++ systems, contributing to high-profile open-source projects such as Microsoft's vcpkg package manager and the PEGTL parsing library. His work focuses on cross-platform build integration, CMake and port-file maintenance, and improving file I/O and compatibility across OSes—skills that help bridge developer tooling and native library ecosystems. Known for pragmatic problem solving, he routinely navigates platform-specific build quirks, library linking choices, and fallback strategies for missing standard features. A Princeton-trained computer scientist, he pairs deep systems-level expertise with a practical sense for making complex builds reproducible and portable. Colleagues rely on him for stabilizing build pipelines and integrating third-party libraries into large-scale Windows and Linux development environments.

9 years of coding experience

B.S.E., Computer Science, B.S.E., Computer Science at Princeton University

Italian, Spanish, German

Github Skills (19)

c-language10

package-management10

windows10

linux10

cmake10

headeronly10

fileio10

file-processing10

file-handling10

vcpkg10

cpp10

file-access10

cprogramming-language10

parser-combinators9

lib9

Programming languages (8)

MDXTypeScriptC#C++RustCCMakeJavaScript

Github contributions (5)

microsoft/vcpkg

Aug 2018 - Jan 2023

C++ Library Manager for Windows, Linux, and MacOS

Role in this project:

Backend Developer

Contributions:1 review, 34 commits, 46 PRs in 4 years 6 months

Contributions summary:Bill's primary contributions involve adding and maintaining ports within the vcpkg package manager. Their work includes integrating external libraries, such as `graphqlparser` and `cppgraphqlgen`, and configuring them for use across different operating systems (Windows and Linux). The user modifies CMake files and port files, adjusting build processes and dependencies to ensure successful compilation and linking within the vcpkg environment. They also address build configurations, library types (SHARED vs. STATIC), and incorporate specific build flags for different platforms.

c-plus-plussetuptoolspackage-managermacoscplusplus

taocpp/PEGTL

Apr 2019 - May 2022

Parsing Expression Grammar Template Library

Role in this project:

Back-end Developer

Contributions:48 commits, 8 PRs, 25 comments in 3 years 1 month

Contributions summary:Bill primarily focused on implementing and refactoring internal components related to file input and processing within the PEGTL library. They introduced fallback mechanisms for standard library features, such as `std::filesystem`, and improved compatibility across various platforms. The user also made changes to internal headers and utilized platform-specific functions to map files, enhancing the library's ability to read and process input from files.

pegtlcppgrammarheader-onlyparsing

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