Derrick Stolee
Raleigh, North Carolina, United States
Summary
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RockstarDerrick Stolee is a Principal Software Engineer with 15 years of experience blending deep academic training in combinatorics and graph theory with production-grade engineering focused on Git and developer tools. He has driven performance improvements at scale—contributing key optimizations to the Git source (including sparse pack algorithms, path-based compression, and threaded delta compression) and improving Git for Windows and VFSForGit robustness. At Microsoft and GitHub he has led technical efforts for large monorepos, shipping backend, devops, and test automation changes while mentoring teams and bridging research-grade algorithms with practical product code. Formerly an academic who built research software and led collaborative research groups, he brings a mathematical approach to data structures and algorithms that produces measurable performance gains. Based in Raleigh, NC, Derrick is as comfortable adding a REST API or fixing flaky tests as he is designing novel graph-based algorithms—an engineer who still prefers implementing solutions over theorizing about them.
15 years of coding experience
Github Skills (40)
algorithm10
azure-devops-server10
git10
algorithms10
scripting10
testing10
net10
msys10
authentication10
user-authentication10
dotnet10
c1110
data-structure10
pacman10
c1710
Programming languages (15)
Github contributions (5)
microsoft/scalar
Aug 2019 - Oct 2022
Scalar: A set of tools and extensions for Git to allow very large monorepos to run on Git without a virtualization layer
Role in this project:
Backend Developer
Backend DeveloperContributions:10 releases, 80 reviews, 625 commits in 3 years 3 months
Contributions summary:Derrick's primary contribution involved removing code related to virtualization, suggesting a focus on adapting the project to function without virtualization layers. The changes modified several files, including tests, and involved deleting virtualization-specific code from the codebase. The user also made updates to unit tests, and to the project configuration.
virtualization
microsoft/VFSForGit
Aug 2018 - Aug 2022
Virtual File System for Git: Enable Git at Enterprise Scale
Role in this project:Back-end & DevOps Engineer
Back-end & DevOps EngineerContributions:6 releases, 42 reviews, 410 commits in 4 years 1 month
Contributions summary:Derrick's contributions primarily involved improvements to the GVFS service and related tools, focusing on the underlying system's stability and performance. This included fixing a flaky test involving the background prefetch thread, implementing more robust error handling, optimizing the packfile maintenance process, and improving the handling of loose objects to minimize overhead during file system operations. The user also refactored code to improve efficiency and added unit tests to verify correct functionality.
virtual-file-system
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