Joe Walnes is a seasoned software leader with 22 years of experience building experimental products and infrastructure, currently heading Experimental Projects at Stripe after senior engineering and leadership roles at Apple and Google. He blends hands-on systems and embedded engineering—evidenced by founding Sneaky Squid and shipping a Bluetooth off-camera flash that reached Apple Stores—with backend expertise in high-concurrency systems and web protocols. An active open-source contributor, Joe authored and improved influential tooling such as websocketd and contributions to Webbit and SiteMesh that demonstrate deep experience with WebSocket/HTTP servers and asynchronous I/O. He excels at taking ambiguous technical problems from prototype to product, comfortable across firmware, cloud services, and developer-facing tooling. Based in San Francisco, he brings entrepreneurial instincts and a pattern-matching approach to spotting future platform opportunities inside large organizations.
Contributions summary:Joe contributed to the core SiteMesh API, with a focus on building blocks used within a SiteMesh based application. The changes involved the development of core API interfaces and classes, including `Content`, `Property`, `ContentProcessor`, and `DecoratorApplier`. These contributions demonstrate the user's work in designing and implementing the foundational components of the SiteMesh framework, ensuring its basic functionality, and promoting future extensibility.
Turn any program that uses STDIN/STDOUT into a WebSocket server. Like inetd, but for WebSockets.
Role in this project:
Backend Developer
Contributions:75 commits, 4 PRs, 11 pushes in 4 years 5 months
Contributions summary:Joe contributed to the core functionality of the `websocketd` project by implementing features, fixing bugs, and improving the codebase. They added command-line options for version and help information and introduced Windows examples in JScript and VBScript for testing. Further work included removing redundant code and a deprecated configuration option, along with ensuring consistent code formatting.
websocketsproxywebsocket-serverwebsocketstdin
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Joe Walnes - Head Of Experimental Projects at Stripe