Blake Watters
Founding Engineer, Principal at Baselayer
California, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolBlake Watters is a founding engineer and principal with 15 years building product-led businesses, developer tools, and distributed systems from early startups to enterprise-ready platforms. Based in California, he blends deep hands-on engineering (iOS, TypeScript/Node, Python asyncio, Go, Kubernetes) with product instincts and repeated founder/operator experience. He’s shipped SDKs, CI/CD pipelines, and client-facing Kubernetes integrations while leading teams as CTO, VP Engineering, and Director of Sales Engineering. An active contributor to notable iOS open-source projects (AFNetworking, RestKit, KIF), he’s improved test infrastructure and accessibility while hardening networking and Core Data integrations. Blake’s background shows a rare mix of shipping polished consumer mobile experiences and architecting cloud-native optimization products, plus a knack for turning complex integration work into repeatable automation. He tends to focus on developer experience and testability, turning brittle systems into maintainable platforms that scale with customers.
16 years of coding experience
19 years of employment as a software developer
The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Stackoverflow
6,617reputation
482kreached
66answers
1question
xcode
top-5%
iphone
top-5%
http
top-5%
objective-c
top-5%
rest
top-1%
ios
top-5%
Github Skills (31)
accessibility10
unit-testing10
uitest10
objective-c10
ios10
user-interface10
xctest10
afnetworking10
rest10
swift10
coredata10
ui-testing10
test-automation10
api-design9
restful-api9
Programming languages (10)
Github contributions (5)
RestKit/RestKit
Jul 2010 - Jul 2014
RestKit is a framework for consuming and modeling RESTful web resources on iOS and OS X
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:2005 commits, 3 comments in 4 years
Contributions summary:Blake contributed to the RestKit framework, focusing on Core Data integration and API improvements. They removed unnecessary code related to managed object store references and added functionalities such as a new setting to enable setting the target object for data to be mapped to, enabling improved code reuse. Further, they made improvements to the class by incorporating various testability improvements and ensured that test cases run correctly.
iosrestrestful
AFNetworking/AFNetworking
Sep 2012 - Aug 2013
A delightful networking framework for iOS, macOS, watchOS, and tvOS.
Role in this project:QA Engineer / Test Automation Engineer
QA Engineer / Test Automation EngineerContributions:27 commits in 10 months
Contributions summary:Blake primarily contributed to the testing infrastructure of the AFNetworking library. They implemented unit tests for core functionality, including HTTP request operations and client behavior. Furthermore, the user added test coverage for request body construction and operation cancellation scenarios, enhancing the robustness and reliability of the framework. They also incorporated logging during tests and fixed issues related to multi-part file uploads.
iosmacosnetworkingtvoswatchos
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