Hyrum K. Wright, PhD

Summary

I teach people. From university students to large organizations, I help people learn how to improve their software engineering processes and improve productivity. I am an expert in large-scale software system maintenance and evolution, co-author of Software Engineering at Google, and the name behind Hyrum's Law.

Experience

August 2024-Present | Adobe, Inc. | Principal Scientist

• Led company-wide dependency management strategy and software engineering ecosystem policy.

July 2012-August 2017, April 2018-August 2024 | Google, Inc. | Senior Staff Software Engineer

• Co-authored Software Engineering at Google, the definitive book on how software engineering functions within Google.
• Started, grew and led the Code Health and Automated Changes teams for Google software infrastructure.
• Pioneered tools and techniques for doing large-scale automated program transformation.
• Formalized what has come to be known as "Hyrum's Law".

January 2015-January 2024, as requested | Carnegie Mellon University | Visiting Lecturer

• Taught Principles of Imperative Programming.
• Taught Foundations of Software Engineering.
• Taught Software Engineering for Startups.

September 2017-April 2018 | Duolingo, Inc. | Staff Software Engineer

• Developed tools and techniques for improving engineering process throughout the company.

January 2010-June 2012 | WANdisco, Inc. | Director of Open Source

• Managed team of open source developers working on a number of projects.
• Assisted in implementing company open source initiatives and strategy.

Dec. 2006-June 2012 | Apache Subversion Open Source Project | Full Committer, Release Manager

• Design and implement features across all aspects of the system; gather user input; speak at user and developer events.
• Release manager 2008-2012.
• As final president of the Subversion Corporation, helped orchestrate migration to the Apache Software Foundation.
• Worked on Subversion-related contract and consulting projects, including Google Summer of Code 2007.

Dec. 2008-Dec. 2009 | PrO Unlimited | Subversion Contractor

• Contractor assigned to Juniper Networks to assist with CVS-to-Subversion migration.
• Helped design and implement new working copy metadata management library for Subversion.

May 2008-August 2008 | VMware, Inc. | Technical Staff Intern

• Responsible for design and development of Linux guest-based tools notification feature.

May 2007-May 2008 | University of Texas at Austin | Research Assistant

• Helped develop and test wireless network prototyping environment.
• Ran experiments to test various MAC and physical layer protocol capabilities.

Sept. 2006-May 2008 | University of Texas at Austin | Teaching Assistant

• Head TA for graduate Engineering Programming Languages course.
• TA for Java-based Data Structures course.
• One of several TAs for entry-level Intro to Programming course.

April 2002-August 2006 | Brigham Young University, Office of Information Technology | Software Engineer

• While an undergraduate student, helped build and maintain the University's academic web applications, including registration and grading.
• For the final 1.5 years of my time, I was the lead engineer in developing a new student planning product, assisting with the design of the system, and supervising implementation.

Education

2008-2012 | University of Texas at Austin

• Ph.D. in Software Engineering
• Research interests: Release Engineering, Open source software development
• Dissertation: Release Engineering Processes, Their Faults and Failures

2006-2008 | University of Texas at Austin

• M. S. in Engineering, Computer Engineering
• Research area: Software Engineering, Wireless Networking

2002-2006 | Brigham Young University

• B.S. in Computer Engineering
• Minor in Mathematics

Publications

• H. Wright, Incremental Type Migration Using Type Algebra, Proceedings of the 2020 IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance and Evolution (ICSME), 2020. [PDF]
• T. Winters, T. Manshrek, and H. Wright, eds., Software Engineering at Google: Lessons Learned from Programming Over Time, O'Reilly Media, 2020
• H. Wright, D. Jasper, M. Klimek, C. Carruth, and Z. Wan, Large-Scale Automated Refactoring Using ClangMR, Proceedings of the 29th International Conference on Software Maintenance, Eindhoven, The Netherlands, 2013. [PDF]
• H. Wright, and D. Perry, Release Engineering Practices and Pitfalls, Proceedings of the 2011 International Conference on Software Engineering, Zurich, Switzerland, June 6-8, 2012. [PDF]
• J. Tsay, H. Wright, and D. Perry, Experiences Mining Open Source Release Histories, Proceedings of the 2011 International Conference on Software and Systems Processes, Honolulu, Hawaii, May 21-22, 2011.
• H. Wright, M. Kim and D. Perry, Validity Concerns in Software Engineering Research, Proceedings of the FSE/SDP workshop on Future of software engineering research, Santa Fe, New Mexico, November 7-8, 2010. [PDF] [BibTeX]
• H. Wright, Release Engineering Processes, Models, and Metrics, Doctoral Symposium, ESEC/FSE 2009, Amsterdam, The Netherlands, August 25, 2009. [PDF] [BibTeX]
• H. Wright and D. Perry, Subversion 1.5: A Case Study in Open Source Release Mismanagement, 2nd Emerging Trends in FLOSS Research and Development Workshop, Vancouver, Canada, May 18, 2009. [PDF] [BibTeX]
• W. Kim, M. Khan, K. Truong, S. Choi, R. Grant, H. Wright, K. Mandke, R. Daniels, R. Heath, Jr., S. Nettles, An Experimental Evaluation of Rate Adaptation for Multi-Antenna Systems, INFOCOM 2009, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, April 20-25, 2009. [PDF] [BibTeX]
• W. Kim, H. Wright, and S. Nettles, Improving the Performance of Multi-hop Wireless Networks using Frame Aggregation and Broadcast for TCP ACKs, ACM CoNEXT 2008, Madrid, Spain, December 9-12, 2008. [PDF] [BibTeX]

Academic Service

• BYU Computer Science Department Industry Advisory Board (2019-present)
• 2025 ICSME Program Committee - Registered Reports
• 2022 ICSME Program Committee - Industry Track
• 2021 ASE Program Committee - Research Track
• 2020 ICSME Program Committee - Industry Track
• 2019 ICSME Program Committee - Research Track
• Dagstuhl Seminar 18122 Participant

Awards/Honors

EDGE Center Scholar, 2006-2007

BYU University Academic Scholarship, 2002-2006

Dean's List, 2002-2003, 2003-2004

Eagle Scout, 1995

Miscellany

Volunteer missionary, 2000-2002

Spent two years as a volunteer missionary for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Los Angeles, California. Responsibilities included directing daily proselyting activities, and managing groups of 6-8 other missionaries in the same.

Amatuer Radio Operator, Extra Class. Callsign: N7YM

Holder of FCC Restricted Radiotelephone Operator Permit

FAA Certified Commercial Pilot - Airplane Single Engine Land, Instrument Rated

FAA Certified Part 107 Remote Pilot