Derek Thomas
Staff Software Engineer at Waymo
Mountain View, California, United States
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolDerek Thomas is a Staff Software Engineer in Mountain View with 14 years of experience architecting mission-critical software that interfaces with the physical world, currently leading systems work at Waymo. He combines a PhD-trained background in materials and computational surface science with hands-on engineering across robotics and space systems at Cruise and Made In Space, bringing deep domain knowledge to hard real‑time and safety-sensitive problems. Derek is an effective technical lead and mentor who moves between low-level integration and high-level architecture, and he often contributes to open-source developer tooling—improving terminal tooling and REPLs (notably enhancements to xonsh, ptpython, and tmux-powerline) that reveal a knack for polishing developer experience. Colleagues rely on him for pragmatic solutions that balance rigorous testing with production needs, and his rare blend of materials-science rigor and systems engineering gives him a distinctive edge in complex physical-system software.
14 years of coding experience
17 years of employment as a software developer
Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.), Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.) at 東京大学 / The University of TokyoBachelor of Science (BS), Bachelor of Science (BS) at University of Virginia
Japanese, English
Stackoverflow
1reputation
0reached
0answers
0questions
Github Skills (16)
cli10
replit10
xonsh10
git10
bash10
shell10
tmux10
repr10
python10
matplotlib10
asyncio10
testing9
prompt-toolkit9
configuration-file9
configurations9
Programming languages (8)
Github contributions (5)
erikw/tmux-powerline
Sep 2012 - Feb 2013
⚡️ A tmux plugin giving you a hackable status bar consisting of dynamic & beautiful looking powerline segments, written purely in bash.
Role in this project:
Full-stack Developer
Full-stack DeveloperContributions:14 commits in 5 months
Contributions summary:Derek primarily contributed to enhancing the `tmux-powerline` plugin, written in bash. They fixed bugs related to CPU usage and platform compatibility (Mac). Further enhancements included the addition of Git integration, expanding the plugin's ability to provide detailed VCS information, including the number of staged, modified, and untracked files. Additionally, the user improved performance and fixed output issues.
statusbarconfigurationvimcopy-pastesegments
xonsh/xonsh
Oct 2016 - Oct 2016
:shell: Python-powered shell. Full-featured and cross-platform.
Role in this project:Backend Developer
Backend DeveloperContributions:19 commits, 1 PR, 26 comments in 7 days
Contributions summary:Derek focused on enhancing the `xonsh` shell's matplotlib integration, a Python-powered shell. Their work involved modifying the `xontrib-mpl` module, which is for plotting. They refactored the plotting code, implemented iTerm2 and inline image support, and added tests to ensure that matplotlib figures are preserved and correctly rendered within the terminal. These modifications demonstrate a strong understanding of the integration of external libraries within the shell environment.
unixiterm2pythonsystem-administrationxonsh
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