John Hewson
Principal Engineer at Airbnb
San Francisco, California, United States
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolJohn Hewson is a Principal Engineer in San Francisco with a Ph.D. in informatics and 14 years building full-stack, AI-enabled web platforms and developer tooling. He combines rigorous research training with hands-on system design—shipping realtime collaborative editors, large-scale search over millions of papers, and consumer AI experiences now powering features at Airbnb. A longtime open-source maintainer and Apache PDFBox PMC member, he’s made deep backend fixes and UX-minded improvements to PDF tooling (including notable work on pdf2htmlEX). Comfortable across TypeScript, React, Node, Java and distributed data stacks, he’s equally at home optimizing low-level libraries as leading product-facing architecture. His work often blends theory and practice, from an OCaml compiler for constraint languages during his PhD to production services serving millions of users.
14 years of coding experience
12 years of employment as a software developer
Doctor of Philosophy - PhD Informatics, Doctor of Philosophy - PhD Informatics at The University of EdinburghMaster’s Degree Bioinformatics, Master’s Degree Bioinformatics at The University of Manchester
Stackoverflow
1reputation
0reached
0answers
0questions
Github Skills (14)
html10
javas10
git10
git-repository10
pdf10
pdf-processing10
c-language10
cprogramming-language10
github10
java10
command-line9
computer-engineering9
command-line-interface9
digital-signature8
Programming languages (10)
Github contributions (5)
apache/pdfbox
Feb 2014 - May 2018
Mirror of Apache PDFBox
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:851 commits, 7 comments in 4 years 3 months
Contributions summary:John's contributions focused on standardizing AcroForm fields within the Apache PDFBox project. This involved modifying existing Java code related to PDF document handling, specifically impacting files related to form fields and digital signatures. The changes indicate a focus on refining and ensuring consistency within the codebase, indicating a role in enhancing the core functionality of the library. These modifications suggest a focus on improving the foundational elements of the library.
pdfboxjava
coolwanglu/pdf2htmlEX
Jan 2013 - Jan 2013
Convert PDF to HTML without losing text or format.
Role in this project:Full-stack Developer
Full-stack DeveloperContributions:28 commits in 6 days
Contributions summary:John primarily contributed to enhancing and refactoring the `pdf2htmlex` project. Their work included improving version information, fixing memory leaks, and cleaning up usage behavior. They also added a flag to override DRM settings and refactored the argument parsing to be more user-friendly, demonstrating a focus on both functionality and user experience.
pdf-to-html
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