Chris Watkins
Senior Software Engineer at Medmont International Pty Ltd
Melbourne, Victoria, Australia
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolChris Watkins is a senior software engineer with 12 years of experience building systems-level software in C++ and Rust, currently based in Melbourne. He has shipped complex features at scale for Chrome video playback and Amazon's Silk browser, and more recently focuses on developer tooling and platform work from his time at Canva. Comfortable across OS, browser, and compiler domains, he has a proven knack for stabilizing large codebases—evidenced by his contributions to the Oils shell project fixing null dereferences, execve environment handling, and integrating the wait builtin. He combines low-level systems expertise with practical engineering judgment, having designed developer-facing infrastructure like a commit queue and run clang-tidy transformations across Chrome. A background in mechatronics and international exchange study rounds out his pragmatic, multidisciplinary approach to building reliable software.
12 years of coding experience
8 years of employment as a software developer
Exchange Program Engineering and Computer Science, Exchange Program Engineering and Computer Science at The University of Texas at AustinThe University of MelbourneExchange Program Computer Science, Exchange Program Computer Science at University of Vigo
Spanish
Github Skills (22)
c-language10
posixct10
text-editor10
scripting10
c1110
c1710
vim10
neovim10
script10
api10
posix10
sh10
nvim10
shell10
backend10
Programming languages (9)
Github contributions (5)
oils-for-unix/oils
Jul 2022 - Jul 2022
Oils is our upgrade path from bash to a better language and runtime. It's also for Python and JavaScript users who avoid shell!
Role in this project:
Backend Developer
Backend DeveloperContributions:11 reviews, 7 commits, 33 PRs in 17 days
Contributions summary:Chris primarily contributed to improving the core functionality of the Oils project by addressing critical issues in the C++ codebase. Their work involved fixing null pointer dereferences within the `List::reserve()` method, ensuring correct environment passing to `execve()`, and updating the `posix::_exit()` implementation. Furthermore, the user integrated the `wait` builtin function by translating the `wait` command, which made significant progress in the native passing of background spec tests. The user's contributions improved the project's stability and compatibility with shell functionalities.
unixpythonjavascriptlinuxruntime
watk/oil
Jul 2022 - Apr 2023
Oil is a new Unix shell. It's our upgrade path from bash to a better language and runtime. It's also for Python and JavaScript users who avoid shell!
Contributions:19 pushes, 19 branches in 9 months
unixpythonjavascriptlinuxruntime
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