John Firebaugh
Software Engineer at Figma
San Francisco, California, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolJohn Firebaugh is a seasoned software engineer with 15 years of experience building high-performance, production-grade systems and developer tools from San Francisco. He has led map-rendering and core engineering teams at Mapbox and now applies that platform and API expertise at Figma, combining low-level performance work with cross-platform systems design. A prolific open-source contributor, John has improved major projects across the mapping and Ruby/JavaScript ecosystems—from Mapbox and Leaflet to Mocha and Rubinius—often focusing on robust testing, performance optimizations, and API simplification. His work includes impactful refactors (error capture in Sentry’s Ruby SDK, bcrypt hardening for Node, and precision-safe polyline math) and features that enable interoperability (toGeoJSON, triangulation fixes, and cross-iframe test reliability). He’s as comfortable mentoring and setting technical direction as he is shipping small, carefully tested patches that improve developer ergonomics. A UC Berkeley CS graduate, he pairs deep practical knowledge of distributed and front-end systems with a knack for making complex tooling easier to adopt.
16 years of coding experience
17 years of employment as a software developer
BA, Computer Science, BA, Computer Science at University of California, Berkeley
Stackoverflow
131reputation
36kreached
1answer
0questions
Github Skills (70)
python10
testing10
geojson10
ruby10
numerics10
headeronly10
encoding10
polygons10
javascript10
data-conversion10
computation10
polygon10
uid10
mochajs10
jsdoc10
Programming languages (25)
Github contributions (5)
jfirebaugh/konacha
Feb 2012 - Nov 2016
Test your Rails application's JavaScript with the mocha test framework and chai assertion library
Role in this project:
Full-stack Developer
Full-stack DeveloperContributions:188 commits, 20 PRs, 49 pushes in 4 years 9 months
Contributions summary:John's contributions primarily centered around enhancing the JavaScript testing capabilities of the Rails application, Konacha. They updated dependencies like Chai, implemented templating features with Sprockets, and integrated transaction support for JavaScript tests. Furthermore, the user renamed the project from "Matcha" to "Konacha," signifying a core part of the project's functionality. These changes indicate a focus on both front-end (JavaScript testing) and integrating with the Rails backend environment.
javascriptrailstest-framework
mapbox/polyline
Dec 2013 - Apr 2018
polyline encoding and decoding in javascript
Role in this project:Full-stack Developer
Full-stack DeveloperContributions:23 commits, 11 PRs, 12 pushes in 4 years 4 months
Contributions summary:John primarily contributed to the core functionality of the `polyline` library, demonstrating proficiency in both encoding and decoding algorithms. They refactored the code base to minimize the API surface, improve the floating point math, and add custom precision support. The user also implemented test cases for functionality and expanded the command-line interface with a toGeoJSON option.
javascriptpolyline
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