John Hewson
Principal Engineer at Airbnb
San Francisco, California, United States
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolJohn Hewson is a Principal Engineer in San Francisco with 13 years of full-stack software experience and a PhD in Informatics from the University of Edinburgh. He currently helps drive AI-powered experiences on Airbnb’s AI Experience team, merging robust engineering with product-focused innovation. An active open-source contributor and PMC member of Apache PDFBox, he contributed to pdf2htmlEX and core PDF handling, including memory management improvements and user-friendly tooling. His career spans leadership and individual contributor roles at Beautiful.ai and GamePlanner.AI, and he founded Inkwell, demonstrating a track record of shipping practical software and building teams. With an interdisciplinary background including a Master’s in Bioinformatics and a solid software engineering foundation, he blends research rigor with pragmatic, scalable solutions.
13 years of coding experience
12 years of employment as a software developer
Doctor of Philosophy - PhD, Informatics, Doctor of Philosophy - PhD, Informatics at The University of EdinburghBachelor’s Degree, Software Engineering, Bachelor’s Degree, Software Engineering at The University of Manchester
Stackoverflow
1reputation
0reached
0answers
0questions
Github Skills (16)
html10
javas10
git10
pdf10
git-repository10
pdf-processing10
c-language10
github10
java10
c-programming-language10
commandline9
command-line9
computer-engineering9
command-line-interface9
commandline-interface9
Programming languages (10)
Github contributions (5)
apache/pdfbox
Feb 2014 - May 2018
Mirror of Apache PDFBox
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:851 commits, 7 comments in 4 years 3 months
Contributions summary:John's contributions focused on standardizing AcroForm fields within the Apache PDFBox project. This involved modifying existing Java code related to PDF document handling, specifically impacting files related to form fields and digital signatures. The changes indicate a focus on refining and ensuring consistency within the codebase, indicating a role in enhancing the core functionality of the library. These modifications suggest a focus on improving the foundational elements of the library.
pdfapache-pdfboxxmlapachepdfbox
coolwanglu/pdf2htmlEX
Jan 2013 - Jan 2013
Convert PDF to HTML without losing text or format.
Role in this project:Full-stack Developer
Full-stack DeveloperContributions:28 commits in 6 days
Contributions summary:John primarily contributed to enhancing and refactoring the `pdf2htmlex` project. Their work included improving version information, fixing memory leaks, and cleaning up usage behavior. They also added a flag to override DRM settings and refactored the argument parsing to be more user-friendly, demonstrating a focus on both functionality and user experience.
pdfconvert-pdftypesettinghtml-to-pdfcjk
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