William LeFebvre

Wiliam LeFebvre has been using Unix & Internet technologies since 1983. He is currently the chief architect for ifThen, a web design and development company. William designs and creates scalable and resilient production web environments, DevOps processes, continuous integration and continuous deployment solutions, cloud services, test automation frameworks, performance metrics, and monitoring. He was a founding partner in Digital Valence with Monty Mullig and has worked with many clients including Comcast, Synacor, Coca Cola, and AT&T. Previously, William was a Technology Fellow at Turner Broadcasting where he designed system architectures for many of Turner’s high-volume websites including CNN.com, Money.com, SI.com, NASCAR.com & CartoonNetwork.com. William ran his own consulting business in the late 1990’s, helping companies with Unix systems & Internet technologies, and teaching Cisco classes as a certified Instructor. Previously William worked at Argonne National Laboratory designing and installing classified networks for the US Army in the Pentagon and Seoul, South Korea. He received his bachelor’s degree in 1983 and a Master of Science degree in 1987, both from Rice University.

Wen Xing

Facebook software engineer Wen Xing is a Rice CS alumna.

Wen Xing (B.S. ’13) is a Facebook software engineer in New York. She has served in roles as the product technical lead  and the mobile engineering lead for the News product team, as well as an iOS engineer on App Infrastructure team and a full stack engineer on Commerce team. She will be discussing React.js at the 35th Anniversary Celebration.

Nicholas Hirsch

Rice Computer Science alumnus Nicholas Hirsch is an entrepreneur in Seattle.

Rice Computer Science alumnus Nicholas Hirsch (B.S. ’10) is an experienced software generalist with a love for all problems, technical and otherwise. After working as a software engineer for Amazon and as a senior team lead at Blucora, he ventured out to start his own companies. During the 35th Anniversary of the Computer Science Department at Rice University, he will be moderating the “What was Useful about my Rice CS Experience” panel.

Hirsch said, “I’ve been programming since I was 12, I asked for a compiler (Microsoft Visual C++) for my 14th birthday, and I’ve been hooked on software ever since. I’ve worked on linux kernel drivers, custom embedded systems for robotics, mobile apps, web apps, cloud infrastructure, front-end client libraries, micro-service APIs, database applications, etc… I’ve handled the job responsibilities of being a software engineer, team lead, people manager, project manager, QA specialist, and now business owner.

His current company, SimplyAugmented, is building foundational technology to power augmented reality (AR) solutions.

Alisha Stupp

Rice CS alumna Alisha Stupp (BA '18) is a Software Engineer at Google.

Alisha Stupp (BA ’18) is a Software Engineer at Google. She took her first Rice Computer Science course as a sophomore and declared CS as a major during her second course. She said, “I liked the application of math and logic to projects in COMP 140 – it was a nice balance for the pure math in my other major. I really enjoyed the discrete math in COMP 182.”

During the department’s 35th anniversary, she’ll be talking about what she found useful in her Rice CS experience. Stupp advised prospective CS students to plan ahead. “I wish I’d started earlier, in order to take more electives later on. Of all the majors, CS is the one that most resembles a ladder. Every step builds up another foundation. If you plan well, you can get those early foundation courses in a place and still have time to plan where you want your ladder to lead,” she said.

Read her CS student profile to learn more about her internship and startup experiences while at Rice.