Melvin Walls
Software Engineer at Oil Shell
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States
Summary
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RockstarMelvin Walls is a software engineer with 11 years of experience focused on systems and backend development, currently based in Pittsburgh and working at Stack AV. He specializes in modernizing and refactoring core infrastructure—most notably contributing to the Berkeley Extensible Software Switch (BESS) by converting modules to C++, improving performance, and defining core module APIs and tests. At Nefeli and Berkeley NetSys Lab he worked on high-performance networking and research-grade systems, and he continues contributing to the Oils project to bridge shell scripting with more robust runtimes. Melvin enjoys tackling unfamiliar domains, pairing pragmatic engineering with careful refactoring and test-driven improvements, and often surfaces deeper design fixes rather than just surface bug repairs.
11 years of coding experience
8 years of employment as a software developer
Github Skills (18)
c-language10
architecture10
network-programming10
architectures10
cprogramming-language10
python9
system-design9
dpdk9
hashtable8
test-framework8
develop8
error-handling8
testing8
ip7
build-automation7
Programming languages (5)
Github contributions (5)
NetSys/bess
Oct 2016 - Mar 2022
BESS: Berkeley Extensible Software Switch
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer & System Architect
Back-end Developer & System ArchitectContributions:1 review, 270 commits, 235 PRs in 5 years 5 months
Contributions summary:Melvin's commits focused on refactoring and modernizing the core backend modules of the BESS software switch. Their contributions included converting existing code to C++ and refactoring various modules like `Queue`, `HashLB`, `IPLookup`, and `PortOut`. The changes involved updating dependencies and improving performance. Additionally, they were responsible for implementing module testing frameworks and associated test code and for defining the core module API.
berkeleybessswitchextensible
oils-for-unix/oils
Oct 2022 - Jan 2023
Oils is our upgrade path from bash to a better language and runtime. It's also for Python and JavaScript users who avoid shell!
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:265 reviews, 51 commits, 152 PRs in 3 months
Contributions summary:Melvin focused on improving the "Oils" project by implementing bug fixes and adding features related to the C++ code base, including improvements to standard library inclusions and function signatures. The user also made changes to the Python core, addressing issues with list comprehension and signal handling. These contributions involved code generation, improvements to error handling, and refactoring existing code for better maintainability.
unixpythonjavascriptlinuxruntime
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