Welcome
I'm William Pearson.
I'm a Computer Engineering graduate. My primary focus is on software. I am really excited by both operating systems and compilers.
I am looking for my next adventure as a Senior Software Engineer.
From 2017 through 2025, I was employed by Microsoft as a Software Engineer II in Azure Compute. While interning at Google, I worked on the memory management subsystem of the Linux kernel.
The views I express on this website are solely my own. They do not reflect the views of any of my past employers. My hobby projects are also solely my own.
In 2019, I resolved to read more books. Since then, reading has been one of my main hobbies. I like physical books. I like the tactile feel of paper pages. I do not want the distraction or eye strain of a screen. It is easier for me to process information by reading it than it is for me to process by listening to it. I source books to read mostly from my local library. That first year, I did most of my reading during my daily commute by bus. When COVID shut down the public library, among other things, my reading pace slowed down to a crawl. Since public libraries have re-opened, I picked up my habit of borrowing books from the library. I no longer commute by bus everyday, but I find other times for reading.
From roughly 2010 through roughly 2020, programming was my main hobby. I did projects that were libraries or other tools although I started off with quite a few web projects. I tried to use the right tool for the job. Often, the right tool is C, Python, or Rust. Of course, one of the right tools for any web project is JavaScript. Sometimes bash is the right tool. Sometimes perl is the right tool because bash isn't quite powerful enough. Sometimes Powershell is the right tool because a script has to run on Windows. I started out programming in Ruby but I now prefer Python.
On a computer, I spend most of my time in Terminal and Emacs. The only activity which I have found to demand a GUI is web browsing due to images and video not displaying at all in edbrowse. I prefer open source software and generally use Debian GNU/Linux or Arch Linux. I release most of my code under the GNU GPL v3 or later although a couple of my projects — such as my toml library — are underneath the MIT License.
Some of my other hobbies are hiking, and board games.
