Billy Donahue
Senior Software Engineer at MongoDB
New York, New York, United States
Summary
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Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolBilly Donahue is a senior software engineer in New York with 10+ years of production C++ experience across databases, distributed systems, and embedded firmware. He has driven backend and database work at MongoDB and Google, contributing to core projects such as the MongoDB server and Bigtable-focused libraries. His open-source contributions show a focus on correctness, performance and maintainability—fixing layering violations in MurmurHash3, optimizing indexes to reduce storage, and improving JSON and formatting libraries. Earlier roles span embedded ARM/DSP firmware and 3G wireless R&D, giving him uncommon depth from low-level hardware interfaces to large-scale server systems. He also taught electrical engineering topics, reflecting an ability to explain complex technical concepts clearly. Known for pragmatic refactors and test-framework improvements, he blends engineering rigor with a long-term view on code health.
10 years of coding experience
18 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor of Engineering - BE, Electrical Engineering, Bachelor of Engineering - BE, Electrical Engineering at The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art
Stackoverflow
564reputation
51kreached
9answers
0questions
Github Skills (31)
unit-testing10
json10
c-language10
lib10
formatting10
chrono10
chronos10
code-library10
text-formatting10
printf10
bson10
cprogramming-language10
code-optimization9
performance-optimization9
hashing-algorithm9
Programming languages (7)
Github contributions (5)
mongodb/mongo
Oct 2017 - Jan 2023
The MongoDB Database
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer & Database Engineer/Administrator
Back-end Developer & Database Engineer/AdministratorContributions:16 reviews, 572 commits, 11 PRs in 5 years 4 months
Contributions summary:Billy's contributions primarily involved fixing layering violations within the MurmurHash3 code, by refactoring to remove unnecessary dependencies and by applying other improvements to ensure proper code structure. They also implemented and tested enhancements in the unit test framework, by adding support for new test capabilities, improving existing tests, and fixing bugs in test setups. The user further worked on improving performance and reducing the size of the database by replacing previous data structures and applying optimizations on key indexes.
nosqlc-plus-plusmongodb-databasedatabasemongodb
open-source-parsers/jsoncpp
Jul 2017 - Mar 2021
A C++ library for interacting with JSON.
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:113 reviews, 39 commits, 72 PRs in 3 years 8 months
Contributions summary:Billy focused on refactoring and improving the JSONcpp library's code related to string handling and numeric representation within the library. This included modifying how floating-point numbers are written, adding support for handling special float values, and improving the precision of the output. Several commits addressed whitespace cleanup and formatting, which suggests a focus on code quality and maintainability within the library.
cppc-libraryc-plus-plusheader-onlyjson
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