John Starks
Partner Software Engineer at Microsoft
Seattle, Washington, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolJohn Starks is a Partner Software Engineer at Microsoft with 11 years of experience building OS virtualization, container, and Windows platform integrations from deep in the kernel-adjacent plumbing up to developer-facing tools. He architects and implements host compute, VM and container features—contributing to high-profile open-source projects like Moby and the Microsoft hcsshim and go-winio libraries—improving stdin/stdout handling, named pipes, and utility VM image management. Based in Seattle, he blends systems-level Go and Win32 expertise with DevOps experience on Docker tooling and CI build changes, and has driven production fixes, vendoring, and test ports for Windows containers. Previously a Principal Development Lead and long-tenured Microsoft engineer, he translates low-level API constraints into robust, testable platform code. Notably, his work on CreateProcessWithStdHandlesInComputeSystem and CloseWrite semantics demonstrates a focus on reliable cross-process I/O and graceful lifecycle handling that rarely shows up in product feature blurbs. He holds a BA in Mathematics and Computer Science from Yale and favors pragmatic refactors that reduce technical debt while increasing interoperability.
10 years of coding experience
4 years of employment as a software developer
BA Mathematics Computer Science, BA Mathematics Computer Science at Yale University
Github Skills (33)
docker10
wp-api10
windows10
winapi10
httpc10
containerization10
networking10
dockers10
docker-api10
http-client10
go10
golang10
error-handling10
ws-api10
devops10
Programming languages (12)
Github contributions (5)
microsoft/go-winio
Jan 2016 - May 2019
Win32 IO-related utilities for Go
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:2 releases, 87 commits, 69 PRs in 3 years 4 months
Contributions summary:John primarily focused on enhancing the `go-winio` library, a utility for Win32 IO-related tasks in Go. Their contributions involved fixing bugs related to named pipes, particularly ensuring that the `Close()` function correctly aborts and handles `Listen()` calls. Furthermore, the user addressed errors to better align with the Go `net` package, and implemented features such as the support of `CloseWrite()` for message mode pipes, also, by improving its efficiency.
golangwin32windows
microsoft/hcsshim
Jul 2015 - Oct 2019
Windows - Host Compute Service Shim
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:7 releases, 17 reviews, 206 commits in 4 years 3 months
Contributions summary:John primarily contributed to the improvement of the `hcsshim` library, specifically focusing on the container process handling within the Windows Host Compute Service (HCS). They implemented the use of `CreateProcessWithStdHandlesInComputeSystem` to provide stdin, stdout, and stderr, improving the way the library manages container processes. The user refactored existing code to leverage generated code and enhanced error handling. Furthermore, they added functionality for managing base layers, and utility VM images.
shimwindowshostcompute
Find and Hire Top DevelopersWe’ve analyzed the programming source code of over 60 million software developers on GitHub and scored them by 50,000 skills. Sign-up on Prog,AI to search for software developers.