Walther Chen
Software Engineer at SecureDNA
Somerville, Massachusetts, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolWalther Chen is a software engineer with 11 years of experience who pivoted from careers in law and martial arts instruction into backend and systems engineering, now based in Somerville, MA. He specializes in Rust for correctness, safety, and performance, building production systems from OLAP engines and SQL parsers to DNA synthesis screening pipelines. As a founding engineer at Select Star and creator of the tesseract OLAP engine, he has deep experience extracting and serving metadata and query history at scale. He contributes to open-source graphics tooling as a full-stack developer on the piet project, improving text layout, multi-line support, and backend integrations. Comfortable across Python, Rust, and distributed architectures, he combines rigorous attention to correctness with a practical focus on maintainability and mentorship. His unusual background as a lawyer and martial arts instructor informs a disciplined, pragmatic approach to problem solving and team leadership.
11 years of coding experience
6 years of employment as a software developer
Doctor of Law (JD), Doctor of Law (JD) at Northeastern University School of LawBA, Biology, BA, Biology at Williams College
English, Chinese
Github Skills (7)
rust10
graphic10
cairo10
text-rendering10
multiplatform9
webassembly9
cross-platform9
Programming languages (15)
Github contributions (5)
linebender/piet
Aug 2019 - Apr 2020
An abstraction for 2D graphics.
Role in this project:
Full-stack Developer
Full-stack DeveloperContributions:19 commits, 33 PRs, 22 pushes in 8 months
Contributions summary:Walther primarily contributed to the text rendering functionality within the `piet` graphics abstraction library. They implemented and refined text layout features, including multi-line support and hit testing capabilities, and made the necessary adjustments for the cairo and web backends. The user also refactored the text-related code into its own module, improved documentation, and fixed a bug in hard/soft break handling. These changes indicate a focus on enhancing the text rendering capabilities of the graphics library.
graphic
hwchen/c3c
Oct 2024 - Dec 2025
Compiler for the C3 language
Contributions:58 pushes, 12 branches in 1 year 2 months
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