Jeff Terrace
Principal Software Engineer at Dropbox
Acton, Massachusetts, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolJeff Terrace is a Principal Software Engineer with 16 years of experience designing systems and shipping robust application-level and infrastructure software, now leading engineering at Dropbox after a long tenure at Google. He blends academic rigor from a PhD in computer science with hands-on delivery, having improved tooling and testing in high-profile open-source projects like Emscripten and gsutil. Jeff's work spans test automation, backend and DevOps improvements, and performance diagnostics—often focused on subtle correctness and reliability issues such as mmap behavior and byte-transfer accounting. Colleagues rely on him for system design depth and for modernizing test suites to support concurrent, cross-platform workflows. Based in Acton, MA, he brings a researcher’s attention to detail to production-scale services and a track record of quietly fixing the corner cases others miss.
15 years of coding experience
13 years of employment as a software developer
Chelmsford High SchoolBS, Computer Science, BS, Computer Science at University of Massachusetts AmherstPhD, Computer Science, PhD, Computer Science at Princeton University
English
Stackoverflow
66,066reputation
9.4mreached
642answers
40questions
redirect
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python-sphinx
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javascript
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numpy
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Github Skills (65)
python10
testing10
ascii10
pip10
tuples10
numpy10
emscripten10
webassembly10
json10
python-sphinx10
serialization10
filter10
package-manager10
google-cloud-storage10
unicode10
Programming languages (11)
Github contributions (5)
GoogleCloudPlatform/gsutil
Nov 2012 - Oct 2018
A command line tool for interacting with cloud storage services.
Role in this project:
Back-end & DevOps Engineer
Back-end & DevOps EngineerContributions:125 commits, 11 comments, 2 issues in 5 years 11 months
Contributions summary:Jeff primarily contributed to improving the gsutil command-line tool, focusing on both functionality and testing. They addressed an off-by-one error in byte transfer reporting and enhanced the test runner by adding return code handling to commands and integrating "set -o pipefail" for error detection in bash. Additionally, the user introduced a new perfdiag command with a focus on diagnostic tests, along with fixes to Windows compatibility issues and added functionality.
command-line-toolgcpstorage-servicescloudcloud-storage
emscripten-core/emscripten
Oct 2011 - Jan 2012
Emscripten: An LLVM-to-WebAssembly Compiler
Role in this project:QA Engineer / Test Automation Engineer
QA Engineer / Test Automation EngineerContributions:20 commits in 3 months
Contributions summary:Jeff primarily focused on enhancing the test suite for the Emscripten project. Their contributions included refactoring the test runner to use unique working directories for concurrent testing, changing function names to avoid conflicts with the testing framework, and adding and modifying tests, particularly related to memory management and various C/C++ language features. The user also added an mmap test and optimized mmap implementation.
emscriptenwebassemblycompilerwasmllvm
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