Sam Donow is a Core Developer with 12 years of experience, spending roughly a decade at Hudson River Trading designing robust infrastructure for crypto trading and other high-stakes systems. He blends low-level C++ expertise used in trading software with a pragmatic taste for clean, sometimes delightfully perverse code—interests in esolangs and code golf inform his appreciation for what makes code elegant and resilient. At HRT he has rotated through research, order entry, risk, and post-trade teams and has led NY Core Markets 1 and Posttrade Inputs, pairing hands-on development with team leadership and internship program co-leadership. Open-source contributions include backend work on a SystemVerilog compiler (slang), improving preprocessors, lexing, and error handling—skills that translate to compiler-like care in production systems. Based in New York and trained in math and CS at Williams College, he combines technical rigor with a playful curiosity about language and game design. Colleagues would describe him as a meticulous engineer who prefers durable, well-designed solutions over flashy shortcuts.
12 years of coding experience
3 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor’s Degree, Mathematics and Computer Science, Bachelor’s Degree, Mathematics and Computer Science at Williams College
Contributions:41 commits, 39 PRs, 43 pushes in 9 days
Contributions summary:Sam primarily contributed to the development of the SystemVerilog compiler and language services. Their work involved implementing and refactoring preprocessor directives, including `undef`, `undefineall`, `begin_keywords`, and `end_keywords`. They also focused on fixing bugs and improving error handling related to compiler directives and type propagation rules. The user's contributions included enhancements to the lexer and preprocessor, ensuring proper line directive handling and macro stringification.
Contributions:172 commits, 58 pushes in 8 years 4 months
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Sam Donow - Core Developer at Hudson River Trading