Colin Decker
Software Engineer at Google
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolColin Decker is a seasoned Software Engineer with 16 years of experience focused on Java libraries and backend systems, currently building core Java tooling at Google from Pittsburgh. He has a strong track record of improving developer workflows and CI/CD — migrating builds to GitHub Actions, fixing javadoc and release issues, and hardening compilation across major projects. Colin is an active contributor to high-profile open-source projects such as Dagger, Guice, Guava, Error Prone, and Flogger, where his work spans refactoring core framework code, API cleanup, logging improvements, and performance-focused changes. His background includes government-contracted Java development and hands-on QA/test improvements, reflecting a pragmatic blend of engineering, automation, and quality assurance. He also brings an unexpected humanities angle, having studied Japanese language and history at Keio University, which complements his technical depth with cross-cultural perspective.
16 years of coding experience
4 years of employment as a software developer
B.S., Computer Science, B.S., Computer Science at William & MaryN/A, Japanese Language and History, N/A, Japanese Language and History at Keio University
Japanese
Stackoverflow
109,290reputation
15.9mreached
714answers
4questions
swing
top-5%
arraylist
top-1%
dictionary
top-5%
character-encoding
top-5%
oop
top-5%
synchronization
top-5%
Github Skills (105)
benchmark10
annotations10
testing10
spring-data10
assertion-framework10
guice10
refactor10
javas10
junit10
ascii10
build-automation10
maven10
eclipse10
refactoring10
static-analysis10
Programming languages (5)
Github contributions (5)
google/jimfs
Aug 2013 - Sep 2022
An in-memory file system for Java
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer & Database Engineer
Back-end Developer & Database EngineerContributions:3 releases, 3 reviews, 427 commits in 9 years 2 months
Contributions summary:Colin primarily contributed to refactoring and improving the core file system implementation. They switched from using `FileKey` and `FileStorage` to using a plain `File` in one instance, improving file system operations. They also optimized file lookups and attribute handling by re-organizing several internal classes and modifying data structures.
filesystemjava
google/caliper
Jan 2015 - Aug 2022
Deprecated micro-benchmarking library for Java
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:1 release, 141 commits, 5 PRs in 7 years 8 months
Contributions summary:Colin primarily contributed to the development and maintenance of the Caliper benchmarking library for Java. Their work involved refactoring and improving existing code, including performance enhancements for the ObjectExplorer and migrating dependencies. They also addressed compatibility issues, such as fixing Java 8 compilation failures and updating dependencies. Furthermore, the user implemented new features, such as status messages in trial output and preventing GC during warmup for macro benchmarks.
benchmarkingjava
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