Harrison Houghton
Staff Software Developer at The Trade Desk
Greater Burlington Area United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolHarrison Houghton is a Staff Software Developer with nine years of hands-on experience building reliable back-end systems, currently shaping platform work at The Trade Desk. Trained at Cornell in Computer Science, he progressed from managing student developer teams to senior engineering and leadership roles at Morgan Stanley and The Trade Desk. A regular open-source contributor to flagship Scala projects—including the Scala compiler and Scalaz—he focuses on compiler internals, type checking, bytecode generation, and functional programming ergonomics, bringing deep language and tooling expertise. Colleagues rely on him for practical optimizations and for tackling subtle edge cases in core libraries, skills that translate into robust production systems and clearer developer UX. Based in the Greater Burlington Area, he pairs enterprise-grade delivery experience with a sustained commitment to improving language-level developer tooling.
9 years of coding experience
10 years of employment as a software developer
Boston College High SchoolComputer Science, Computer Science at Cornell University
Github Skills (15)
scala-compiler10
type-system10
scalaz10
functional-programming10
type-checking10
type-check10
scala10
codegen9
jvm9
bytecode9
annotation-processing8
annotations8
build-automation7
java5
javas5
Programming languages (11)
Github contributions (5)
scala/scala
Apr 2017 - Sep 2020
Scala 2 compiler and standard library. Scala 2 bugs at https://github.com/scala/bug; Scala 3 at https://github.com/scala/scala3
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:10 reviews, 139 commits, 151 PRs in 3 years 5 months
Contributions summary:Harrison primarily contributed to the Scala compiler and standard library, focusing on bug fixes, optimization, and feature enhancements. They addressed issues related to type checking, code generation, and handling edge cases with annotations and value classes. Their work involved modifying core compiler components, including type checking, erasure, and bytecode generation, while also improving code efficiency and functionality.
functional-programmingobject-oriented-programmingscala-libraryscala-programming-languagestandard-library
scalaz/scalaz
Nov 2017 - Mar 2019
Principled Functional Programming in Scala
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:53 commits, 38 PRs, 13 pushes in 1 year 3 months
Contributions summary:Harrison contributed to the Scalaz library, focusing on functional programming concepts in Scala. Their work involved addressing compiler warnings related to code covariance, enhancing error messages for type mismatches, and refactoring existing code. They also introduced syntax improvements like `z""` interpolator, and updated build configurations. These changes refined core functionalities and enhanced the developer experience.
functional-programmingscalajsscalazscalascala-js
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