Hugh Willson
Director Of Engineering at Apollo GraphQL
Ottawa, Ontario, Canada
Summary
🤩
RockstarHugh Willson is a Director of Engineering based in Ottawa with 11 years of hands-on experience building and shipping full-stack JavaScript applications. He leads at Apollo GraphQL while remaining an active open-source contributor, with notable commits across high-profile projects like Apollo Client, Apollo Link, Meteor, and graphql-tools that span frontend UI polish, GraphQL schema tooling, and secure HTTP behavior. Hugh blends developer ergonomics and platform reliability—refactoring dependency stacks, improving client awareness headers, and modernizing local state patterns—showing both product-focused pragmatism and deep protocol-level understanding. Colleagues can expect a leader who still codes: he routinely touches React, GraphQL, and tooling that developers use daily, and often contributes subtle but impactful fixes that improve interoperability and security across ecosystems.
11 years of coding experience
Stackoverflow
1,399reputation
40kreached
65answers
0questions
meteor
top-5%
Github Skills (40)
javascript10
testing10
app-framework10
typescript10
ui-design10
wpgraphql10
mochajs10
uid10
apollo-client10
front-end-development10
wordpress-graphql10
typescript-types10
graphql10
web-framework10
graphql-js10
Programming languages (16)
Github contributions (5)
apollographql/fullstack-tutorial
Oct 2018 - Jul 2020
🚀 The Apollo platform tutorial app
Role in this project:
Full-stack Developer
Full-stack DeveloperContributions:59 commits, 25 PRs, 35 pushes in 1 year 9 months
Contributions summary:Hugh contributed significantly to the frontend of the Apollo GraphQL tutorial application, particularly by modifying React components. They updated the `Launch` and `Cart` pages, including component and state management logic, and integrated the `@apollo/react-hooks` library to consume GraphQL data. The user also implemented state management using `makeVar` to manage local data within the client.
reactjavascriptapollo-servergraphqlapollo-client
meteor/todos
Apr 2016 - Jun 2018
The example app "Todos", written following the Meteor Guide
Role in this project:Full-stack Developer
Full-stack DeveloperContributions:71 commits, 75 PRs, 35 pushes in 2 years 2 months
Contributions summary:Hugh primarily focused on updating and refactoring the existing test suite within the Meteor/todos project. Their work involved removing arrow functions from Mocha tests across multiple files, updating package dependencies, and fixing linting errors. Additionally, the user made adjustments to the UI and API for internationalization support and updated publication tests. This involved modifications to both front-end and back-end components.
todos-apptodosmeteorfollowing
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