Rick Brewster
Owner at dotPDN, L.L.C.
Kirkland, Washington, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolRick Brewster is a seasoned software engineer and entrepreneur with over a decade of experience building high-impact desktop and mobile software, best known as the creator and ongoing owner of Paint.NET. He has held engineering roles at Microsoft and Facebook where he contributed to core UI and debugging tooling—improving Android developer workflows in prominent open-source projects like Stetho and Litho. Rick combines deep systems and UI expertise with pragmatic product ownership, shipping performant graphics and editor features while maintaining private repos for flagship work. Based in Kirkland, Washington, he pairs a formal CS/math background with hands-on optimization skills and a long track record of fixing subtle bugs and memory issues that improve real-world stability.
11 years of coding experience
13 years of employment as a software developer
B.S. Computer Science Mathematics, B.S. Computer Science Mathematics at Washington State University
Stackoverflow
3,394reputation
143kreached
60answers
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top-1%
Github Skills (20)
debugging10
image10
android-debug10
ui-design10
java10
javas10
dom10
performance-optimization10
android10
litho10
front-end-development9
uid9
directx6
transparency6
direct2d6
Programming languages (11)
Github contributions (5)
facebook/stetho
Mar 2015 - Jul 2017
Stetho is a debug bridge for Android applications, enabling the powerful Chrome Developer Tools and much more.
Role in this project:
Full-stack Developer
Full-stack DeveloperContributions:85 commits, 82 PRs, 56 pushes in 2 years 5 months
Contributions summary:Rick's commits primarily focused on enhancing the Elements tab within the Stetho debug bridge for Android applications. They implemented features to add functionality, such as adding ID attributes to views and supporting fragments within the UI. The user also fixed multiple bugs and memory leaks, including issues related to null pointer exceptions and the document tree diffing mechanism. These contributions improved the usability and stability of the Elements tab.
android-applicationandroid-applicationschromestetho
facebook/litho
Apr 2017 - Aug 2017
A declarative framework for building efficient UIs on Android.
Role in this project:Mobile Developer (Android)
Mobile Developer (Android)Contributions:7 commits in 4 months
Contributions summary:Rick's contributions focused on improving the Android UI framework, Litho. They addressed layout issues in `CardSpec`, replacing data structures for improved performance, and implementing optimizations for list manipulations within `ComponentHostUtils`. Furthermore, they added a factory to customize `LithoView` creation. The work indicates a strong understanding of Android UI development and optimization techniques within the Litho framework.
android
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