Derek Williams
Senior Software Engineer at Cold Logic Solutions Inc.
Edmonton, Alberta, Canada
Summary
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SeniorDerek Williams is a Senior Software Engineer with 17 years of experience building resilient, high-performance distributed systems, currently based in Edmonton and focused on outside-IR35 contract roles. He is a Scala specialist (ZIO, Akka, FS2) comfortable across the JVM and fluent in functional programming, with additional experience in Haskell, Rust, Python and systems tooling like Kafka, Postgres, Kubernetes and AWS. Derek has been a core contributor to the influential Akka project and has improved production-critical components (futures, serialization, allocation reductions) in major open-source libraries. He combines hands-on implementation with mentoring and rigorous code review, often shaping frameworks and shared core libraries used company-wide. Notably, his background spans both greenfield platform work—designing account/session/permission systems for Caesars—and low-level optimizations in financial and media systems, reflecting a rare mix of pragmatic product delivery and deep systems craftsmanship.
17 years of coding experience
12 years of employment as a software developer
Github Skills (13)
scala10
data-serialization10
redis-client10
exception-handling10
futures10
redis10
concurrency10
serialization10
software-design9
data-structures8
testing8
data-structure8
algorithms7
Programming languages (2)
Github contributions (5)
akka/akka
Dec 2010 - Feb 2012
A platform to build and run apps that are elastic, agile, and resilient. SDK, libraries, and hosted environments.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:386 commits in 1 year 2 months
Contributions summary:Derek's contributions focused on modifying and improving the Akka project's core features. The commits show a pattern of updating the internal implementation of futures, modifying the data structures, adding new methods to improve functionality, and fixing bugs that would affect the stability and functionality of futures. These contributions included making code more type-safe, increasing performance by reducing allocations, and ensuring the system's stability by handling exceptions.
resilientactor-modelreactiveconcurrentdistributed-actors
debasishg/scala-redis
Dec 2010 - Dec 2010
A scala library for connecting to a redis server, or a cluster of redis nodes using consistent hashing on the client side.
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:12 commits in 4 days
Contributions summary:Derek primarily focused on implementing and improving serialization within the scala-redis library. They made changes to the `RedisProtocol.scala`, `SetOperations.scala`, `SortedSetOperations.scala`, and `ListOperations.scala` files, indicating efforts to enhance data handling and the overall functionality of interacting with Redis. The commits also included additions to the `Deque` and `PubSub` functionalities, alongside adjustments to testing procedures, suggesting a focus on expanding features and ensuring code quality.
hashingredisredis-clientclient-sidescala-library
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