Howard Ship is a Senior Staff Software Engineer with 17 years of experience building distributed systems and developer tooling, currently driving shared libraries and infrastructure at Nubank to support thousands of microservices. A longtime Clojure advocate, he maintains the Pedestal framework used across Nubank and has been a key contributor to high-profile open-source projects like Lacinia (GraphQL) and Boot, improving build tooling, federation support, and testing. His background spans Java-era framework design—authoring and popularizing Apache Tapestry—to modern microservice and data engineering work at Walmart, where he rewrote and open-sourced core GraphQL infrastructure. Based in Portland, he blends low-level craftsmanship (build systems, dependency management, and performance fixes) with pragmatic product delivery and DevOps experience. Colleagues value his ability to turn complex backend and build problems into reusable tools that scale across teams.
17 years of coding experience
20 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor's degree Computer Science, Bachelor's degree Computer Science at Worcester Polytechnic Institute
Contributions:37 reviews, 1109 commits, 326 PRs in 5 years 11 months
Contributions summary:Howard focused on enhancing the Lacinia GraphQL implementation in Clojure by refactoring code and adding features for supporting Apollo Federation and better argument handling. They made substantial changes to the parser, and schema compilation to enhance the features and functionality. The commits also included the addition of test suites, which demonstrates that the user's contributions included testing and bug fixes.
Contributions:1 release, 41 reviews, 71 commits in 3 months
Contributions summary:Howard contributed to the Pedestal server-side libraries by implementing build rules for Codox output generation and adding related dependencies. They updated copyright years in various code files, including benchmarks and samples. The user also introduced `deps.edn` files for modules like `aws` and `service-tools`, indicating they were working on dependencies and module setup. The commits demonstrate their focus on build processes, documentation generation, and dependency management within the Clojure-based Pedestal framework.
leiningengardenrumpedestalserver-side
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Howard Ship - Senior Staff Software Engineer at Nubank