William Glas

01About

A bit about me.

I grew up in Raleigh, North Carolina. My first software job was automating test cases at Sageworks the summer I finished high school, and I’ve been writing code for a living ever since. Today I’m a senior engineer at GitHub.

In college I spent my summers interning. At Allscripts I built a prescription signing flow with two-factor authentication, and at Microsoft I worked on the team behind Visual Studio Team Services. I joined Microsoft full-time after finishing my CS degree at NC State, then moved to GitHub in 2020 and was promoted to Senior there.

At GitHub I work on things developers use all day: pull requests, Code View, the in-browser editor, repository automation, Apps and Actions, Codespaces, and Copilot tooling. I work across the stack, from React and TypeScript to Node.js, Python, and the Rails monolith, plus the Docker and Kubernetes setup it all runs on.

I care about accessible interfaces, tests I can trust, systems that recover on their own, and code reviews where someone learns something. I like working on teams that check whether what we shipped actually helped.

Close-up of a developer desk at night with code on an ultrawide monitor and a notebook showing a hand-drawn system architecture sketch. — The workspaceSenior Software Engineer

Years shipping production software: 7+
Since 2020 · Senior since 2024: GitHub
Intern 2018 · Engineer 2019-2020: Microsoft
B.S. Computer Science, 2015-2019: NC State

Developer Platforms
GitHub Apps, Actions integrations, repository automation, and Codespaces.
AI / LLM Systems
Copilot workflows that use repository context, with tool calling, streaming, and evaluation.
Distributed Systems
Event-driven services with async jobs, caching, rate limits, and retries.
Cloud Infrastructure
Docker, Kubernetes, Terraform, and CI/CD on Azure and AWS.

How I like to work

01
Tests first
My first job was writing test automation, and the habit stuck. Good tests let a team change things without worrying about what breaks.
02
Accessible by default
Keyboard, screen reader, and reduced-motion support ship with the feature.
03
Measure the change
If we can't tell whether a change helped, we're guessing.
04
Grow the team
Mentoring and careful code review make the whole team better.

02Experience

Building at GitHub and Microsoft.

From a QA internship in Raleigh in 2015 to senior engineer at GitHub.

~45 min → ~10 s
Codespaces setup with prebuilds
Codespaces workflows
55%
Faster task completion (GitHub research)
Copilot engineering workflows
~27 s → <1 s
Rendering an ~18,000-line file
Code View & pull-request experiences

2020 → Present
GitHub
Senior Software Engineer
Jul 2020 - Present
Remote · Raleigh, NC
Joined in 2020 and was promoted to Senior. Works on pull requests and Code View, the in-browser editor, repository automation, GitHub Apps and Actions, Codespaces, and Copilot tooling, from the React front end down to the Rails monolith.
1. 2020 Software Engineer
2. 2021 Software Engineer II
3. 2022 Software Engineer III
4. 2024 Senior Software Engineer
Developer automation platforms
Architected developer automation and repository-management platforms spanning frontend, APIs, event handling, and data storage.
Node.js
TypeScript
Python
React
GraphQL
REST
Webhooks
PostgreSQL
MySQL
Redis
GitHub Actions
GitHub Apps & Actions integrations
Built GitHub Apps and Actions integrations with authentication, async processing, caching, rate limiting, retries, and event-driven automation.
Node.js
TypeScript
Octokit
GraphQL
Webhooks
Redis
Relational databases
Codespaces workflows
Worked on GitHub Codespaces workflows and cloud infrastructure; prebuilds helped reduce environment setup from roughly 45 minutes to around 10 seconds.
Python
Docker
Kubernetes
GitHub Actions
Cloud infrastructure
2019 → 2020
Microsoft
Software Engineer
Mar 2019 - Jul 2020
Redmond, WA
Came back full-time after a 2018 internship to work on the Microsoft Commerce Platform: services, REST APIs, and pages for catalog, cart, checkout, and orders on Azure.
Full-stack commerce features
Developed full-stack features for the Microsoft Commerce Platform supporting product catalog, customer accounts, shopping carts, checkout, orders, and fulfillment workflows.
C#
ASP.NET Core
Angular
TypeScript
Azure
Azure SQL
Shopping, checkout & account workflows
Built shopping, checkout, and account workflows across Angular/TypeScript frontends and ASP.NET Core REST APIs, integrating product, pricing, inventory, customer, cart, and order data.
Angular
TypeScript
ASP.NET Core
REST
Backend services & data
Designed and implemented backend services applying authentication, validation, transactional processing, schema design, and query optimization.
C#
ASP.NET Core
Entity Framework Core
Azure SQL
2015 → 2018
Where it started
Three internships while studying at NC State.
1. Microsoft · Software Engineering Intern
  Summer 2018
  A summer on the Cloud Orchestration Platform team of Visual Studio Team Services, the service that became Azure DevOps. He came back full-time the following spring.
  - Cloud orchestration
  - Visual Studio Team Services
2. Allscripts · Software Development Intern
  Summer 2017
  Worked with the Shield team, a cloud security platform for authentication and authorization, building a web app that lets clinicians sign prescriptions electronically using two-factor authentication.
  - C#
  - ASP.NET Core
  - JavaScript
  - SAML
3. Sageworks · Software Quality Assurance Intern
  2015-2017
  His first job: two summers and a spring semester turning manual test cases into Java and Selenium tests, fixing broken ones, and writing shared helpers for the rest of the team.
  - Java
  - Selenium
  - Test automation
2015 → 2019
Bachelor of Science in Computer Science
North Carolina State University
Stayed in Raleigh for college after graduating high school as valedictorian, and spent summers writing production software.

03Projects

Things I’ve built.

Work from GitHub and Microsoft, plus my internships at Allscripts and Sageworks. Pick a skill to see where I used it.

Filter by skill

5 images
01 · GitHub
Developer Automation Platform
Event-driven platform for repository management and developer automation, built on GitHub Apps, webhooks, and GraphQL.
Challenge · Processing webhook events reliably while respecting API rate limits and keeping automation safe to retry.
- Node.js
- TypeScript
- Python
- React
- GraphQL
- +7 more
5 images
02 · GitHub
GitHub Codespaces Automation
Prebuild workflows that turn long development-environment setup into a near-instant start.
Challenge · Preparing reproducible environments ahead of time so starting a codespace doesn't wait on setup.
~45 min → ~10 sEnvironment setup with prebuilds
- Python
- Docker
- Kubernetes
- GitHub Actions
- Cloud infrastructure
5 images
03 · GitHub
AI Engineering Assistant
Copilot-related engineering workflows grounded in repository context, with tool calling, streaming, and automated evaluation.
Challenge · Retrieving relevant repository context within model limits and evaluating output quality automatically.
55%Faster task completion reported by GitHub research
- Python
- LLM APIs
- GitHub Copilot
- Repository-aware retrieval
- Tool calling
- +2 more
5 images
04 · GitHub
High-Performance Code Viewer
Code View and pull-request experiences that render very large files in under a second.
Challenge · Rendering tens of thousands of lines while keeping scrolling, selection, and navigation responsive.
~27 s → <1 sRendering an ~18,000-line file
- React
- TypeScript
- GraphQL
- REST
- Client caching
- +2 more
5 images
05 · GitHub
Rails Backend for Pull Requests
The Ruby on Rails side of pull requests, Code View, and repository pages inside the github.com monolith.
Challenge · Serving nested pull request and repository data without a database query for every record.
- Ruby
- Ruby on Rails
- GraphQL
- graphql-ruby
- MySQL
- +1 more
4 images
06 · Microsoft
Cloud Commerce Platform
Commerce services spanning catalog, carts, checkout, orders, fulfillment, and inventory on Azure.
Challenge · Keeping orders and inventory consistent across services while staying observable in production.
- C#
- ASP.NET Core
- Angular
- TypeScript
- Azure
- +6 more
5 images
07 · Allscripts
Two-Factor Prescription Signing
A web app that lets clinicians sign prescriptions electronically, confirming who they are with two-factor authentication.
Challenge · Making a second authentication factor part of the signing step without slowing clinicians down.
- C#
- ASP.NET Core
- JavaScript
- SAML
- Two-factor authentication
5 images
08 · Sageworks
Selenium Test Automation
Turning manual test cases for Sageworks’ banking software into automated Java and Selenium tests, plus helpers that made the next test easier to write.
Challenge · Turning written test steps into automated tests that stay reliable as the application changes.
- Java
- Selenium
- WebDriver
- Automated testing