Rob Dickerson
Assistant Professor Of Computer Science at Augustana College
Illinois, United States
Summary
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Senior🎓
Top SchoolRob Dickerson is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Augustana College with 16 years of experience spanning industry and academia, specializing in programming languages, formal methods, and program verification and synthesis. He completed a PhD at Purdue focused on practical automated relational verification after a decade-plus in industry where he held engineering and management roles at Square, Riot Games, and startups. At Square he helped build core Android and backend payments infrastructure early in the company’s growth and contributed to notable open-source projects such as Retrofit and Robolectric, improving HTTP client behavior and Android testing utilities. Rob combines hands-on systems and mobile engineering expertise with formal research rigor, bridging practical product needs and provable correctness. He has led cross-functional teams and shipped production features—from encrypted reader firmware to onboarding and growth systems—while mentoring engineers. Based in Illinois, he brings a rare blend of deep implementation experience and formal verification research to both teaching and applied software problems.
16 years of coding experience
12 years of employment as a software developer
Doctor of Philosophy - PhD Computer Science, Doctor of Philosophy - PhD Computer Science at Purdue UniversityBachelor of Science - BS Computer Science Mathematics, Bachelor of Science - BS Computer Science Mathematics at Truman State University
Github Skills (18)
unit-testing10
api-rest10
http-kit10
api-design10
restful-api10
testing10
http10
test-framework10
robolectric10
java10
javas10
http-mock10
http-client10
android10
rest-api10
Programming languages (8)
Github contributions (5)
lysine-dev/retrofit
Jan 2011 - Nov 2012
A type-safe HTTP client for Android and the JVM
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:15 commits in 1 year 9 months
Contributions summary:Rob contributed to the implementation of core HTTP functionalities within the Retrofit library. They added support for GET requests, refactored request construction, and handled different HTTP methods. The user also addressed client-side and server-side error handling, fixing how errors are processed and displayed. Finally, they added improvements to the profiling of HTTP requests.
androidhttp-clientjvmtypesafejava
robolectric/robolectric
Feb 2011 - Apr 2012
Android Unit Testing Framework
Role in this project:QA Engineer / Test Automation Engineer
QA Engineer / Test Automation EngineerContributions:19 commits in 1 year 3 months
Contributions summary:Rob primarily contributed to the Robolectric project by adding and modifying testing-related functionalities. Their work includes adding methods to clear HTTP response rules, implementing a shadow class for a progress bar, and adding functionality to simulate disconnections in network info shadows. They also added improvements to the ShadowDialog class. These contributions enhance Robolectric's testing capabilities and provide more control over simulated Android environments.
android-unit-testingandroidrobolectricjavaunit-testing
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