Willow Hayward
Senior Lead Programmer Writer at Amazon Web Services (AWS)
Castleton, Vermont, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolWillow Hayward is a Senior Lead Programmer Writer at AWS Game Tech with 7 years focused on developer education for game engines, notably authoring tutorials, code samples, and docs for Open 3D Engine (O3DE) and Amazon Lumberyard. A former Microsoft Xbox engineer, she blends systems-level engineering, tooling, and platform support with a writer’s clarity—translating complex engine internals into approachable developer guidance. Willow contributes to O3DE as both a back-end component author and front-end site contributor, improving core templates and the project’s documentation UX. Based in Vermont, she pairs a DigiPen game-dev background with decades of enterprise and Lotus Notes systems experience, giving her an unusually broad perspective on tooling, automation, and platform onboarding. Colleagues rely on her to unblock partners, ship reproducible samples, and shepherd open-source integrations from upstream merges to polished tutorials.
7 years of coding experience
29 years of employment as a software developer
B.S., RTIS, B.S., RTIS at DigiPen Institute of TechnologyComputer Engineering, Computer Engineering at Rochester Institute of TechnologyAllendale Columbia School
Github Skills (18)
javascript10
c-language10
3d-graphics10
website-development10
game-engine10
component-design10
graphics-engine10
html10
cprogramming-language10
3d-engine10
serialization9
ui-design9
data-serialization9
css9
sass9
Programming languages (4)
Github contributions (5)
o3de/o3de.org
Mar 2021 - Jan 2023
The O3DE website
Role in this project:
Front-end Developer
Front-end DeveloperContributions:953 reviews, 214 commits, 299 PRs in 1 year 10 months
Contributions summary:Willow primarily contributed to the website's front-end development, focusing on UI/UX improvements. Their commits include modifications to HTML, JavaScript (app.js), and Sass (custom.sass) files, suggesting involvement in styling, layout, and interactive elements. The changes range from updating navigation and hero sections to adding versioning dropdowns and integrating a mermaid.js diagram tool for documentation. These modifications enhance the user experience and presentation of the website's content.
hugojekyll
o3de/o3de
Aug 2021 - Mar 2022
Open 3D Engine (O3DE) is an Apache 2.0-licensed multi-platform 3D engine that enables developers and content creators to build AAA games, cinema-quality 3D worlds, and high-fidelity simulations without any fees or commercial obligations.
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:20 reviews, 22 commits, 4 PRs in 7 months
Contributions summary:Willow contributed to the open-source 3D engine, O3DE, by implementing a default component template. These contributions included creating component files, interfaces, and header files. The user also added copyright headers and applied suggestions from code reviews, indicating a focus on component design and integration within the engine's architecture. They also merged updates from the upstream development branch.
c-plus-plusmulti-platformcommercialworldshalo
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