James Lin
Staff Engineer at Broadcom
Cupertino, California, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolJames Lin is a Staff Engineer in Cupertino with 19 years of experience building cross-platform UIs and developer tools, from embedded Palm/CLIÉ support to key desktop virtualization interfaces at VMware and developer-facing infrastructure at Google. He specializes in C++ and native UI work—shipping DPI-aware, accessible Windows controls and macOS components—while also automating workflows with Python and custom Perforce/Git tooling. At Google and in open source he contributed to Flutter’s engine and widgets (notably an iOS-focused engine refactor and a VisibilityDetector widget with unit tests), showing a knack for both deep platform internals and polished front-end behavior. Known for large-scale bug triage, code cleanup, and mentoring, he combines system-level expertise with a pragmatic focus on usability and developer productivity. An unexpected through-line: he repeatedly turns brittle, slow scripts and tools into maintainable, high-performance solutions that scale across teams.
19 years of coding experience
20 years of employment as a software developer
BS Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (Computer Science emphasis), BS Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (Computer Science emphasis) at University of California, Berkeley
English
Stackoverflow
85,627reputation
9.9mreached
1,578answers
34questions
windows
top-1%
optimization
top-5%
google-cloud-firestore
top-5%
sorting
top-5%
malloc
top-5%
byte
top-5%
Github Skills (64)
asynchronous10
cmd10
uitest10
web-widgets10
objective-c10
ios10
buffer10
widgets10
flutter-apps10
windows10
http10
winapi10
batchfile10
integrations10
refactor10
Programming languages (14)
Github contributions (5)
google/flutter.widgets
Nov 2018 - Aug 2022
Role in this project:
Front-end Developer
Front-end DeveloperContributions:21 reviews, 80 commits, 61 PRs in 3 years 10 months
Contributions summary:James implemented the `VisibilityDetector` widget for the Flutter framework, which detects when a widget is visible on the screen. Their work included creating the core layer for detecting visibility changes, adding unit tests, and integrating the widget into the Flutter Gallery for demonstration. They also addressed issues related to text selection handles and screen rotations, improving the reliability and usability of the `VisibilityDetector` widget.
flutter/engine
Jul 2018 - Oct 2018
The Flutter engine
Role in this project:Mobile Developer (iOS)
Mobile Developer (iOS)Contributions:9 commits, 22 PRs, 9 pushes in 2 months
Contributions summary:James primarily focused on improving the Flutter iOS engine, implementing and refactoring several components within the iOS framework. Their contributions included deprecating and removing deprecated methods, adding new properties and methods, and fixing potential null pointer dereferences. They also worked on enhancing the splash screen functionality and improving the handling of data within the codec.
flutterflutter-enginec-plus-plus
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