Zelda Hessler
Staff Software Engineer at Apollo GraphQL
Chicago, Illinois, United States
Summary
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RockstarZelda Hessler is a Staff Software Engineer based in Chicago with a decade of experience building backend systems, DevOps pipelines, and SDK tooling—most recently at Apollo GraphQL and as SDE III on the AWS Rust SDK. She has deep expertise in Rust, contributing to high-profile AWS open-source projects (aws-sdk-rust, smithy-rs) where she improved code generation, retry behavior, and CI/CD canaries for production-grade SDK releases. Comfortable at the intersection of infrastructure and developer experience, she has shipped presigned-request examples and integrations for S3, Kinesis, API Gateway, and KMS. Her background also includes hands-on shop-floor skills as a CNC machinist and forklift-certified operator, reflecting a practical, systems-oriented mindset and an ability to bridge hardware-adjacent workflows with cloud-native development.
10 years of coding experience
8 years of employment as a software developer
English
Stackoverflow
1reputation
0reached
0answers
0questions
Github Skills (21)
refactor10
cicd10
aws-sdk10
aws10
amazon-s310
aws-s310
rust10
refactoring10
s3-bucket10
testing9
error-handling9
documentation8
githubaction-workflow8
io8
github-ci8
Programming languages (12)
Github contributions (5)
awslabs/aws-sdk-rust
Sep 2021 - Jan 2023
AWS SDK for the Rust Programming Language
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer & DevOps Engineer
Back-end Developer & DevOps EngineerContributions:6 releases, 80 reviews, 98 commits in 1 year 4 months
Contributions summary:Zelda primarily contributed to the core functionality and infrastructure of the AWS SDK for Rust. They focused on integrating releases from smithy-rs, updating changelogs, and refining version numbers. Additionally, the user worked on implementing and maintaining the canary Lambda functions by generating Cargo.toml, building bundles, and integrating tests, indicating a focus on CI/CD pipelines. These contributions ensured the SDK's maintainability and testing infrastructure.
rustaws-sdksdkawsprogramming-language
smithy-lang/smithy-rs
Sep 2021 - Jan 2023
Code generation for the AWS SDK for Rust, as well as server and generic smithy client generation.
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:8 releases, 1567 reviews, 225 commits in 1 year 4 months
Contributions summary:Zelda made several commits focused on enhancing the `smithy-rs` codebase for AWS SDK for Rust. Their primary contributions include refactoring code, improving the structure and clarity of the codebase, and implementing features such as making retry behavior user-configurable and ensuring service stack is Send + Sync. They also addressed a number of bugs and improved code quality by fixing typos and refactoring configuration logic of retry_configs and other areas.
awsaws-sdk-rustrust
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