Will Hughes
Senior Software Engineer at Discord
San Francisco, California, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolWill Hughes is a Senior Software Engineer in San Francisco with 17 years of experience building developer tooling and backend systems at companies like Discord, Samsara, Uber, and Facebook. He blends systems-level engineering with a passion for programming languages and editor ergonomics—evident from long-standing contributions to Emacs packages and major OSS projects such as rust-analyzer, rust, Flow, and HHVM. Comfortable across full-stack and systems code, he has shipped features touching compilers, language servers, static analysis, and developer UX improvements. His work often focuses on improving developer experience—adding smarter tooling hooks, reliable flycheck integration, and clearer error reporting. An Emacs addict and PL enthusiast, he pairs pragmatic engineering with attention to human factors to make complex tools more usable.
17 years of coding experience
9 years of employment as a software developer
Undergraduate, Software Engineering, Undergraduate, Software Engineering at University of Waterloo
English, French
Stackoverflow
30,431reputation
8.6mreached
138answers
122questions
fonts
top-5%
browser
top-5%
django-models
top-5%
elasticsearch
top-1%
pandas
top-5%
javascript
top-5%
Github Skills (108)
ivy10
programming-language10
parser10
testing10
code-completion10
language-server-protocol10
cffi10
language-design10
ffi10
elasticsearch10
develop10
project-management10
filehandle10
editor10
emacs-lisp10
Programming languages (40)
Github contributions (5)
Wilfred/helpful
Sep 2017 - Dec 2022
A better Emacs *help* buffer
Role in this project:
Full-stack Developer
Full-stack DeveloperContributions:222 commits, 79 PRs, 423 pushes in 5 years 3 months
Contributions summary:Will primarily contributed to the improvement and expansion of the Emacs helpful buffer. They focused on enhancing the user experience through features like showing the source code of functions, variables, and key bindings. The user also fixed bugs and refactored code, including implementing a better keymap rendering and providing support for references to information in the Info manual. Furthermore, they implemented code to support symbols with spaces, handle keybindings in docstrings, and add bookmarking capabilities for the helpful mode.
emacs
remacs/remacs
Nov 2016 - Feb 2019
Rust :heart: Emacs
Role in this project:Back-end Developer & Systems Programmer
Back-end Developer & Systems ProgrammerContributions:397 commits, 258 PRs, 410 pushes in 2 years 3 months
Contributions summary:Will's commits primarily involve implementing Rust code to extend and integrate with the Emacs text editor. Contributions include defining data types and functions in Rust, specifically related to handling integers, floats, and building new Elisp functions. They also focused on integrating Rust code with the existing C codebase, creating bindings and establishing the necessary FFI (Foreign Function Interface) for function calls. The user appears to be adding capabilities to Remacs by writing in Rust and bridging with the C code.
emacsrusteditor
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