William Hawkins
Assistant Professor at MentorUp!!
Cincinnati Metropolitan Area United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolWilliam Hawkins is an Assistant Professor and seasoned software engineer with 11 years of experience bridging academic research and production engineering. He contributes to high-profile open-source projects like Mozilla’s QUIC implementation (neqo) and Firefox for Android (Fenix), focusing on performance, reliability, and test automation. His background spans industry and government labs—from senior performance work at Mozilla to software engineering at the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory—giving him deep expertise in networking, systems, and mobile startup-scale optimization. As a co-founder of MentorUp!! and a long-time mentor, he blends teaching and practical mentorship with hands-on development and QA. He holds a PhD from the University of Virginia and pairs rigorous research training with a track record of shipping measurable performance improvements in real-world products. An under-the-radar strength: he repeatedly shifts between low-level protocol fixes and high-level application startup optimizations, showing versatility across the stack.
11 years of coding experience
14 years of employment as a software developer
BS Computer Science and Math, BS Computer Science and Math at Furman UniversityAnderson High SchoolMaster's Degree Theology/Theological Studies, Master's Degree Theology/Theological Studies at Wesley Theological SeminaryDoctor of Philosophy - PhD Computer, Doctor of Philosophy - PhD Computer at University of Virginia
Github Skills (18)
kotlin10
c-language10
testing10
http10
gcc10
firefox10
performance-optimization10
android10
quic10
rust10
coroutines10
cprogramming-language10
async9
asynchronous9
browser9
Programming languages (26)
Github contributions (5)
mozilla/neqo
Nov 2019 - Dec 2020
Neqo, the Mozilla Firefox implementation of QUIC in Rust
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer & QA Engineer / Test Automation Engineer
Back-end Developer & QA Engineer / Test Automation EngineerContributions:19 commits, 24 PRs, 77 comments in 1 year 1 month
Contributions summary:William primarily contributed to the testing and quality assurance of the `neqo` QUIC implementation. Their commits include removing redundant semicolons to fix compilation issues, updating deprecated functions, and addressing bugs in the HTTP/3 connection logic. They also refactored code for increased readability and performed tests related to QPACK and transport parameters.
firefoxhttp3ietfmozillaquic
mozilla-mobile/fenix
Apr 2019 - Jan 2020
⚠️ Fenix (Firefox for Android) moved to a new repository. It is now developed and maintained as part of: https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/firefox-android
Role in this project:Mobile Developer (Android)
Mobile Developer (Android)Contributions:13 commits, 39 PRs, 1 push in 9 months
Contributions summary:William primarily contributed to the Fenix (Firefox for Android) repository by implementing and optimizing features related to application startup and performance. Their commits focused on parallelizing experiment loading, asynchronously loading the default search engine icon, and speeding up Glean metrics initialization. They also made changes to improve the app's startup time, and refactored notification handling, and addressed a bug related to keeping kotlinx coroutines in Proguard.
firefoxbrowserandroidfirefox-for-androidmozilla
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