Eric Firestone
Senior Software Engineer at Square
Austin, Texas, United States
Summary
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RockstarEric Firestone is a Senior Software Engineer based in Austin, Texas, with 15 years of experience building reliable, high-performance systems at Apple and Square. He blends mobile and backend expertise—contributing notable fixes and enhancements to the iOS functional testing framework KIF and optimizing Swift runtime performance in Square's widely used Wire protobuf/gRPC library. Eric has hands-on experience troubleshooting tricky UI and accessibility tap issues, improving keyboard and memory-warning handling, and speeding up encoding/decoding paths for maps and repeated fields. His work demonstrates a pragmatic focus on correctness, performance, and developer tooling that improves both product quality and engineer productivity. Comfortable moving between low-level performance fixes and cross-platform protocol work, he brings a quietly thorough approach to solving hard engineering problems.
14 years of coding experience
5 years of employment as a software developer
Github Skills (14)
accessibility10
uitest10
objective-c10
swift10
ios10
performance-optimization10
ui-testing10
encoding10
functional-testing10
protocol-buffers10
decoding10
grpc10
data-structure9
data-structures9
Programming languages (13)
Github contributions (5)
kif-framework/KIF
Jun 2011 - Aug 2013
Keep It Functional - An iOS Functional Testing Framework
Role in this project:
Mobile Developer (iOS)
Mobile Developer (iOS)Contributions:60 commits in 2 years 2 months
Contributions summary:Eric primarily contributed to bug fixes and feature enhancements within the KIF framework, an iOS functional testing framework. Their work involved correcting issues related to UI element tapping, specifically addressing incorrect tap locations and improving the accuracy of taps on various UI elements, including those using gesture recognizers like UISwitch. They also implemented improvements for keyboard handling, and added the ability to find and tap on elements that use accessibility labels, including improvements for navigating navigation bar buttons. Moreover, they integrated a step to simulate memory warnings.
objective-ctesting-frameworkkeepfunctional-testingtesting
square/wire
Jun 2020 - Jan 2023
gRPC and protocol buffers for Android, Kotlin, Swift and Java.
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:96 reviews, 129 commits, 27 PRs in 2 years 7 months
Contributions summary:Eric focused on optimizing the Swift runtime for the `square/wire` repository, which involves gRPC and protocol buffers. Their contributions centered on enhancing integer decoding and encoding, adding features to handle repeated data, and incorporating support for encoding and decoding different data types. These changes improved performance, particularly in the handling of maps and various data representations.
protocol-buffersprotobufgrpcandroidbuffers
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