Christopher Willis-ford
Director Of Application Development
Bremerton, Washington, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top School
Top expert inFont and Web Development Technologies
Christopher Willis-ford is a seasoned software leader with 12+ years of engineering experience, currently serving as Director of Application Development at the Scratch Foundation. He has progressed through hands-on roles from senior engineer to principal and director, pairing full-stack and front-end expertise with a strong focus on developer tooling, build systems, and test automation. His open-source contributions to the widely-used Scratch ecosystem span UI, rendering, VM build improvements, and CI-focused QA fixes—demonstrating an ability to ship both user-facing features and robust infrastructure. Prior work at MIT Media Lab, game studios, and tooling teams has given him a knack for bridging research, product, and production engineering. Colleagues rely on him for pragmatic refactors that improve modularity and CI resilience, such as safer file-saving flows and stabilized Selenium-based test runs.
11 years of coding experience
20 years of employment as a software developer
Master of Science - MS, Master of Science - MS at University of IdahoBachelor of Science - BS, Bachelor of Science - BS at Washington State UniversityMaster's Certificate, Master's Certificate at SMU Guildhall
Github Skills (37)
webgl10
filesystem10
javascript10
webdriver10
selenium10
electron10
css10
actionscript10
selenium-ide10
ui-design10
file-operations10
webpack10
uid10
svg10
front-end-development10
Programming languages (8)
Github contributions (5)
scratchfoundation/scratch-desktop
Dec 2018 - Feb 2022
Scratch 3.0 as a self-contained desktop application
Role in this project:
Full-stack Developer
Full-stack DeveloperContributions:26 reviews, 151 commits, 82 PRs in 3 years 2 months
Contributions summary:Christopher primarily focused on improving the desktop application's functionality. Their contributions include fixing file saving issues on macOS, implementing a safer method for saving files using a temporary file, and updating the project to load an initial project from the command line. Further work involved integrating command-line arguments into the render process and modifying the build process. The user also worked on UI updates.
desktop-applicationelectronself-containeddesktopscratch
scratchfoundation/scratch-flash
Jun 2014 - Feb 2019
Open source version of the Scratch 2.0 project editor. This is the basis for the online and offline versions of Scratch found on the website.
Role in this project:Full-stack Developer
Full-stack DeveloperContributions:428 commits, 216 PRs, 320 pushes in 4 years 8 months
Contributions summary:Christopher refactored and abstracted the external interface functionality of the Scratch 2.0 project editor, implementing abstract methods and switching from direct return values to callbacks. This involved modifications to the core `Scratch.as` and `ExtensionManager.as` files to support external JavaScript interaction, and a separate file that was added for future support of 3D rendering. These changes were necessary to adapt the editor for the online and offline versions of Scratch and future functionality.
javascriptbasisscratcheditoroffline
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