James Hillyerd
Senior Software Engineer at Deepgram
Redmond, Washington, United States
Summary
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RockstarJames Hillyerd is a senior backend engineer with 13 years of experience building reliable, scalable systems across startups and hyperscale companies, now at Deepgram after several years at Google. He specializes in backend design, performance analysis, Linux deployment/automation, and full-stack development, with a long-running practical interest in declarative tooling like NixOS and orchestration with Nomad. A strong pragmatist in Rust and Go, he has contributed meaningful open-source improvements—from shell tooling in the popular oh-my-fish project to SMTP/POP3 features in the Inbucket disposable mail server. James combines hands-on coding with clear requirements and documentation skills, and brings deep operational experience from identity systems at Nintendo to cloud services at Google. He’s notable for preferring reproducible, immutable infrastructure and for optimizing developer experience as well as runtime performance.
13 years of coding experience
27 years of employment as a software developer
Stackoverflow
803reputation
98kreached
3answers
0questions
Github Skills (34)
git10
scripting10
plugin-development10
smtp-protocol10
smtps10
smtp10
e-mail10
smtpd10
pop310
script10
go10
sh10
shell10
command-line-interface9
network-programming9
Programming languages (24)
Github contributions (5)
inbucket/inbucket
Oct 2012 - Jan 2023
Disposable webmail server (similar to Mailinator) with built in SMTP, POP3, RESTful servers; no DB required.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:18 releases, 27 reviews, 789 commits in 10 years 5 months
Contributions summary:James primarily worked on back-end features, specifically related to the SMTP and POP3 servers of Inbucket. Their contributions include the implementation of various SMTP commands, such as AUTH LOGIN and APOP, and integrating address validation. They also refactored and improved existing code within the mail storage and delivery system, and implemented the ability to control the storage of messages based on domain.
mailinatorpop3restrestfulsmtp
oh-my-fish/oh-my-fish
Feb 2016 - Nov 2020
The Fish Shell Framework
Role in this project:Full-stack Developer
Full-stack DeveloperContributions:4 comments, 2 issues in 4 years 10 months
Contributions summary:James contributed to the `oh-my-fish/oh-my-fish` repository by implementing a proxy plugin to manage environment variables. They modified the `fish_prompt.fish` theme file to cache hostname and prompt char, and included the addition of LS_COLORS. The user also redesigned the gitignore plugin to improve performance and user experience and also updated the README.md file.
shellfishfishshellomffishshell-framework
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