Hillery Shay
Software Engineer at Element
Oakland, California, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolHillery Shay is a software engineer based in Oakland with a decade of experience building resilient back-end systems and contributing to prominent open-source projects like the Matrix Synapse homeserver and Sygnal push gateway. With a Master's in Interdisciplinary Computer Science, Hillery applies multidimensional thinking to hard problems in security, networking, and decentralized protocols while also keeping close attention to database design and type safety. They combine rigorous analytical skills with proven crisis de-escalation and team-facilitation abilities, enabling productive collaboration under pressure. Past roles span hands-on engineering at Element to community-focused and operational work in healthcare, landscaping, and small business, reflecting a knack for practical problem solving and project ownership. Hillery’s side project DataDiet—an extension that quantifies server-side energy cost of browsing—demonstrates an uncommon blend of systems-level coding and environmental impact awareness. They are driven, dependable, and seeking the next big technical challenge that leverages both deep engineering chops and interdisciplinary insight.
10 years of coding experience
Master's degree, Interdisciplinary Computer Science, Master's degree, Interdisciplinary Computer Science at Mills College
English
Github Skills (11)
mypy10
api10
postgresql10
backend10
back-end-development10
apidoc10
python10
matrix9
utf9
tox9
database-management9
Programming languages (9)
Github contributions (5)
matrix-org/sygnal
Mar 2021 - Aug 2022
Sygnal: reference Push Gateway for Matrix
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:40 reviews, 89 commits, 34 PRs in 1 year 4 months
Contributions summary:Hillery primarily contributed to the Sygnal project by enhancing its backend infrastructure. Their work included making development dependencies available as extras, setting up coverage in the tox environment, and updating black. A significant contribution was the complete removal of the legacy database, simplifying the codebase. They also addressed MyPy linting issues and refactored the code to improve its type safety.
push-gatewaypythonpushgatewaymatrix
matrix-org/synapse
Aug 2021 - Jan 2023
Synapse: Matrix homeserver written in Python/Twisted.
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:4 releases, 434 reviews, 247 commits in 1 year 5 months
Contributions summary:Hillery contributed primarily to the Synapse Matrix homeserver back-end, focusing on features and bug fixes related to the Admin API and database interactions. Their work involved adding and refining features for room search, handling null byte replacements, and improving utilities. They demonstrated an understanding of database design and handling of different character encodings.
pythonmatrix-synapsematrix-synapse-homeserverhomeservermatrix
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