Bill Van Besien
Senior Professional Staff at The Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory
Washington, District of Columbia, United States
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolBill Van Besien is a multidisciplinary senior software engineer with 14 years of experience building systems that span embedded spacecraft flight software to cloud-based backends. Based in Washington, DC, he has spent much of his career at Johns Hopkins APL contributing to NASA missions and research in UAV autonomy, spacecraft penetration testing, and novel network and cryptographic protocols. He combines low-level C and real-time OS expertise with Python, cloud deployment, and platform engineering, having led platform development, QA automation, and CI for reproducible data-science tooling. Bill excels at delivering high-quality, reliable products on schedule by baking testability, security, and craftsmanship into systems from the ground up. He has led interdisciplinary teams as a principal investigator and project manager, translating research into operational prototypes for both DoD flight test ranges and spaceflight testbeds. An understated but telling strength is his comfort owning full product lifecycles—from embedded wiring and Modbus integrations to scalable AWS deployments—demonstrating rare end-to-end technical breadth.
13 years of coding experience
14 years of employment as a software developer
Master of Science - MS, Computer Science, Master of Science - MS, Computer Science at The George Washington University - School of Engineering & Applied Science
Stackoverflow
2,339reputation
247kreached
4answers
48questions
Github Skills (42)
jupyter9
open-science9
docker9
relay-modern9
graphql8
react8
python8
satellite8
data-science7
harness7
embedded-software7
satellite-data7
embedded6
checksum6
operating-system6
Programming languages (2)
Github contributions (5)
gigantum/gigantum-testing
Mar 2019 - Jun 2019
A test harness for the Gigantum Client
Contributions:50 PRs, 168 pushes, 20 branches in 3 months
testingtest-harnessharness
billvb/core-flight-executive
Jun 2012 - Nov 2017
Contributions:20 commits, 2 PRs, 12 pushes in 5 years 6 months
flightsatellitesatellite-databasisembedded-systems
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