Andrew Helwer
Software Engineer at Disjunctive
Seattle, Washington, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolAndrew Helwer is a software engineer with a decade of experience specializing in distributed systems and formal methods—especially TLA+ and SMT/Z3—and currently operates as an independent contractor in Seattle seeking part-time remote work. He combines rigorous formal specification and verification with pragmatic production engineering: at Microsoft he modernized Azure compute tooling, identified $8M in annual data storage savings and personally implemented over $1M of those savings. His open-source contributions include substantive TLA+ specifications in tlaplus/Examples and improvements to the widely used tree-sitter and nvim-treesitter projects, enhancing parsing and editor support for formal languages. He also built tooling for Microsoft Quantum Systems to support nanowire manufacturing and public-facing quantum education, and he maintains active side-interests in quantum computing and the formalization of mathematics. Outside of software he’s an avid rock climber and mountaineer, a hobby that mirrors his taste for methodical, high-stakes problem solving.
10 years of coding experience
8 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor's Degree, Computer Science, Bachelor's Degree, Computer Science at The University of Calgary
English
Stackoverflow
1,487reputation
153kreached
28answers
41questions
sftp
top-5%
Github Skills (37)
parserator10
tlaplus10
tla10
parser10
tree-sitter10
testing10
distributed-systems10
c1110
c1710
neovim10
formal-verification10
distributed-system10
treesitter10
rust10
parsers10
Programming languages (29)
Github contributions (5)
tlaplus/Examples
Dec 2022 - Jan 2023
A collection of TLA⁺ specifications of varying complexities
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:2 releases, 39 reviews, 21 commits in 19 days
Contributions summary:Andrew's contributions primarily involve writing TLA+ specifications, indicating a focus on formal verification and modeling of distributed systems and protocols. Their work includes fixing alignment issues, replacing outdated syntax, and adding specifications for various systems, such as an elevator control system, a key-value store, a blockchain, and a probabilistic consensus protocol. The user's commits reflect a deep understanding of TLA+ and its application in specifying and verifying complex concurrent systems.
model-checkingprotocolspecificationtlaspecifications
nvim-treesitter/nvim-treesitter
Jul 2021 - Jul 2022
Nvim Treesitter configurations and abstraction layer
Role in this project:Full-stack Developer
Full-stack DeveloperContributions:3 reviews, 16 commits, 5 PRs in 1 year
Contributions summary:Andrew primarily focused on enhancing the TLA+ language support within the nvim-treesitter project. Their work included adding and updating TLA+ grammar and queries, encompassing highlights, folds, and injections. They also addressed issues related to code style and grammar versions, and updated the parser and maintainer information, contributing to the overall functionality and maintainability of the project.
nvim-treesitterluatreesittertree-sittervim
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