Debra Willrett is a seasoned software engineer with 12 years of recent professional experience and a multi-decade track record of shipping influential GUI and web applications. She created pioneering project management tools for Apple’s Lisa and Macintosh—LisaProject and the award-winning MacProject—demonstrating early leadership in graphical software design. At Stanford Medicine and the CEDAR project she led full‑stack and front‑end architecture, UX design, and testing for large metadata and medical imaging platforms, bridging user research with production code. Debra excels at re-architecting complex systems for performance and reliability (including custom DICOM image compression and SVG/annotation tooling) and mentoring distributed teams. Based in Palo Alto, she combines deep experience in Java, JavaScript/GWT/AngularJS and data modeling with a strong history of turning mockups and user feedback into robust, production-ready tools. An interesting throughline in her career is consistently solving domain-specific problems—scientific metadata and medical imaging—by inventing pragmatic engineering solutions rooted in decades of UI/UX expertise.
12 years of coding experience
36 years of employment as a software developer
BS, Math, Computer Science, BS, Math, Computer Science at Iowa State University
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