Joe Wilm
Chief Yak Shaver at Latent
San Francisco, California, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolJoe Wilm is a seasoned systems and backend engineer with 13 years of experience building high-throughput infrastructure and developer tools from San Francisco. As former CTO and Technical Fellow at OneSignal he scaled services to tens of thousands of TPS and engineered a Rust delivery service handling billions of daily deliveries, and now leads technical efforts as Chief Yak Shaver at Latent. A prolific open-source maintainer, he created the popular Alacritty terminal and has substantive contributions to core Rust projects like hyper, winit, redis-rs, and rust-postgres, often fixing subtle concurrency and event-handling bugs. Comfortable across C/C++/Rust/JS stacks, he blends low-level systems fluency with pragmatic product focus and a knack for unglamorous but crucial ops work—automating the tedious details that keep large systems reliable.
12 years of coding experience
9 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor of Science (BS) Physics, Bachelor of Science (BS) Physics at Michigan Technological University
Github Skills (32)
caching10
file-management10
postgresql10
freetype10
apidoc10
redis10
testing10
http10
linux10
networking10
hyper10
x1110
api10
font-rendering10
windowing10
Programming languages (18)
Github contributions (5)
alacritty/alacritty
Jan 2017 - Dec 2018
A cross-platform, OpenGL terminal emulator.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:1 release, 2 reviews, 73 commits in 1 year 11 months
Contributions summary:Joe contributed to the development of font rendering capabilities within the Alacritty terminal emulator, primarily working with the FreeType and Fontconfig libraries for font loading and glyph rasterization. The commits showcase the user's focus on implementing features like retrieving and listing font families and names from the system, developing a system for handling font styles and their associated files, and improving performance in rendering characters. They focused heavily on integrating the terminal application with existing system libraries for rendering, including the use of OpenGL for glyph rendering.
emulatorwindowsterminal-emulatorsterminal-emulatorgpu
racer-rust/racer
Nov 2015 - May 2018
Rust Code Completion utility
Role in this project:Backend Developer
Backend DeveloperContributions:90 commits, 60 PRs, 53 pushes in 2 years 6 months
Contributions summary:Joe primarily contributed to improving the caching mechanisms within the Racer utility. Their work involved adding and refining support for caching in long-running processes, as well as introducing features to preload file contents into the session, improving how Racer handles new files and unsaved changes. They also addressed stale cache problems and fixed issues related to file cache generation and safety. These changes focused on enhancing Racer's file handling and performance.
rustcode-completioncompletion
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