Howard Yuan
Head Of Patents And Open Source Standards
Sunnyvale, California, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolHoward Yuan is Head of Patents and Open Source Standards based in Sunnyvale, bringing 12 years of combined legal and engineering experience across patents, litigation, and product counsel for major tech companies. He leverages a rare blend of hands-on hardware and firmware engineering (Sun/Oracle, AMD, Intel) with deep IP expertise—registered before the USPTO and admitted in multiple federal courts—to guide patent strategy and open source compliance at Yahoo. Previously a litigation associate at Paul Hastings, he has handled high-tech disputes spanning wireless, memory devices, e-commerce, and consumer electronics, and led diligence and licensing negotiations. Howard also contributes to open-source infrastructure, enhancing Netflix’s widely used Archaius configuration library with practical fixes for configuration loading, list parsing, and internationalization. He advises engineering and product teams on standards participation, cybersecurity collaborations, and academic partnerships, combining technical fluency with transactional and courtroom experience. Outside work he serves pro bono on the Swords to Plowshares advisory board, reflecting a commitment to community impact.
12 years of coding experience
9 years of employment as a software developer
B.S., Electrical Engineering, B.S., Electrical Engineering at Penn State UniversityJ.D., Law, J.D., Law at The George Washington University Law School
Chinese
Github Skills (6)
javas10
configuration-management10
java10
apidoc9
api9
unit-testing8
Programming languages (2)
Github contributions (5)
Netflix/archaius
Dec 2013 - Dec 2016
Library for configuration management API
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:117 commits, 26 PRs, 15 pushes in 3 years 1 month
Contributions summary:Howard primarily contributed to the Archaius2 configuration management library, focusing on enhancing its core functionalities. Their work included improving configuration loading order, adding support for list-based configurations with delimiters, and resolving CJK character issues. Additionally, the user addressed bug fixes and implemented changes to improve the internal workings of the configuration library, including removing obsolete timestamps and enhancing iteration of the property keys.
apiconfigurationconfiguration-managementconfigapi-management
howardyuan/spring-guice
Nov 2018 - Apr 2021
Tools for using Spring in Guice and Guice in Spring
Contributions:4 pushes, 1 branch in 2 years 5 months
spring-bootguicespring-mvcspringjava
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