Robert Ma
San Francisco Bay Area United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolRobert Zhao is a seasoned software engineer with 14 years of experience building modern, reliable applications and test infrastructures. Based in Canada, he blends back-end development skills in Python with strong test automation and QA experience, contributing to large community projects like Web Platform Tests to reduce flakiness and improve cross-browser reporting. His open-source work includes enhancing user-facing functionality and robustness in multimedia tooling (douban.fm) and improving test tooling and diagnostics for Chrome and Firefox, showing attention to both UX and developer experience. With an engineering degree from McGill and an M.B.A.-style analytics master from UBC Sauder, he brings quantitative rigor to software quality and operational improvements. Colleagues describe him as pragmatic and detail-oriented—someone who finds subtle fixes that prevent recurring production and test failures.
14 years of coding experience
Simon Fraser University
Chinese, English
Github Skills (11)
linux10
javascript10
webtest10
python10
subprocess10
test-automation10
multiplatform9
cross-platform9
firefox8
api8
apim8
Programming languages (15)
Github contributions (5)
web-platform-tests/wpt
Aug 2017 - Jan 2021
Test suites for Web platform specs — including WHATWG, W3C, and others
Role in this project:
Test Automation Engineer / QA Engineer
Test Automation Engineer / QA EngineerContributions:127 reviews, 271 commits, 1413 PRs in 3 years 4 months
Contributions summary:Robert primarily contributed to improving the test suite for the Web Platform Tests (WPT) repository. The user focused on fixing existing tests by addressing flakiness, resolving WebDriver errors, and ensuring correct handling of various edge cases. The user made changes to the test infrastructure and tools to streamline the testing process, including improved handling of Chrome and Firefox browser setup, and fixing unit tests. They also added various improvements to reporting such as including full logs and adding screenshots, helping to better debug and understand test results.
microsoft-edgetest-runnerspecssafarifirefox
taizilongxu/douban.fm
Feb 2015 - Apr 2015
:radio: douban.fm based on Python
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:41 commits, 18 PRs, 22 comments in 2 months
Contributions summary:Robert primarily focused on enhancing the functionality and user experience of the Douban.fm application, which is based on Python. Their contributions included implementing improved Linux notifications, handling volume control more efficiently across different platforms, and optimizing temporary file management for album covers. Further work involved refining subprocess management for better control and error handling within the application's core logic. They also fixed a minor bug relating to the volume and muted status.
radiopythondouban-fmdouban
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