Byron Anderson
I build software systems that help people work together effectively, especially in environments with shared state, concurrent users, and evolving requirements.
My work focuses on the technical challenges behind collaboration:
- Intent preserving audit trails for all users of a system
- Shared state across users and services
- Real-time and near-real-time synchronization
- Conflict resolution and consistency trade-offs
- Designing systems that preserve context and intent
- APIs and tooling that support teams, not just machines
About
I’m a software developer with a strong interest in systems that sit at the intersection of people and infrastructure. I enjoy problems where technical decisions directly shape how teams communicate, make decisions, and know what to do next.
I’ve worked on products and platforms that support collaborative business processes. I care deeply about correctness and maintainability, especially in systems that multiple people rely on simultaneously.
I can see the interface between humans and systems, not just existing deployment implementation details.
Projects of which I am particularly proud
Mechanical Orchard - Safe software modernization
- Platform for modernizing software systems, including:
- measuring "what a legacy system does"
- asserting "the candidate wanted to do the same thing that the legacy system did"
- help implementing the replacement candidate
- My major contributions:
- Introduced a much faster local feedback loop for existing system characterization
- Utilized the Elixir Streaming APIs to tailor assertions quite precisely
Thrive Bioscience - Cell biology processes platform
- Enabling biologists to examine image data
- Annotation and overlay of a "region of the cell plate"
- For example: in the context of a cancer study
- ability to annotate a region as particularly of interest, see the same annotation on newer and older images of the same cell plate
- an opacity slider with between overlayed "old" and "new" images, to see the growth or shrinking of a colony of cells over time
- For example: in the context of a cancer study
- Annotation and overlay of a "region of the cell plate"
- Deep zoom functionality for high resolution stitched cell plate imagery
- I integrated imperative openseadragon library into a declarative react application
Geometer - COVID-19 case tracking application
- Swiftly created to support municipalities
- Customized to emphasize the specifics of COVID-19
- Quite close to customized customer relationship management software, but requiring HIPAA compliance
Kohort - VOIP meeting application
- Meeting VOIP and recordings provided by Twilio
- Integrated features from real time meeting into recording view
- Example: seek to timestamp from transcription click
- Example: play thumbs-up CSS effect over top of the recording view when it was initiated in the real time meeting
- Integrated collaborative text editor
- Backed by Operational Transform for text
Pivotal Tracker - Project management software
- Optimistic updates for edits that may fail
- Rebasing edits when needed:
- Preserving user intent and re-attempting edits on superficial failure
- Discarding edits that no longer semantically apply
- Example: you changed the name of an issue which was deleted by someone else
- While presenting an understandable error message to the user
Philosophy
I aim to build software that makes collaboration legible, where users and developers alike understand what’s happening and why.
Contact me
I’m especially interested in working on products where collaboration is core.
If you’re building tools for teams, shared workflows, or complex coordination, I’d love to talk.