Samuel Williams
Senior Staff Software Engineer at Shopify
Canterbury, New Zealand
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolSamuel Williams is a Senior Staff Software Engineer based in Canterbury, New Zealand, with 18 years of experience building resilient backend systems, developer tools, and high-performance servers. He combines deep Ruby core and concurrency expertise—evidenced by contributions to ruby/ruby, concurrent-ruby, Puma and Rails—with practical DevOps and CI improvements across many open-source projects. A former CTO and current director of his own consultancy, he excels at diagnosing tricky threading, socket, and performance issues and turning them into robust, well-tested solutions. Comfortable leading teams or working autonomously in remote settings, Samuel blends academic rigor (MSc, First Class Honours) with hands-on engineering across startups and large platforms. His GitHub motto, "A candle loses nothing by lighting another," matches a track record of mentoring, sponsoring OSS, and improving critical library internals that many Ruby projects depend on.
18 years of coding experience
13 years of employment as a software developer
Master of Science - MS, Computer Science, First Class Honors, Master of Science - MS, Computer Science, First Class Honors at University of Canterbury
Japanese
Stackoverflow
1,446reputation
411kreached
42answers
27questions
Github Skills (83)
grapesjs10
cloud-computing10
multithreading10
testing10
rspec10
websocket10
c1110
httpc10
ruby10
c1710
mtls10
http-client10
mspec10
webserver10
rack10
Programming languages (27)
Github contributions (5)
socketry/async
Mar 2017 - Jan 2023
An awesome asynchronous event-driven reactor for Ruby.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:22 releases, 57 reviews, 611 commits in 5 years 10 months
Contributions summary:Samuel primarily contributed to modernizing the codebase, tidying up code utilizing existing libraries, and implementing core functionality. They modernized existing example code while also developing new examples of TCP and UDP servers. The user refactored parts of the core reactor and added the ability to perform non-blocking TCP connections.
asynchronousnio4rasyncioreactorruby
rack/rack
Sep 2015 - Jan 2023
A modular Ruby web server interface.
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:9 releases, 428 reviews, 218 commits in 7 years 5 months
Contributions summary:Samuel primarily contributed to the core functionality of the Rack web server interface, addressing documentation errors related to parameter order in HTTP_X_ACCEL_MAPPING. They improved code quality by fixing warnings and updating the use of global variables, as well as adding and testing new server handlers like Falcon. The user also refactored the code to improve performance and to ensure that the response body is consumed correctly.
sinatraweb-serverrackrubymodular
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