Abel Braaksma - Owner at Abrasoft

Abel Braaksma

Owner at Abrasoft

Amsterdam, North Holland, Netherlands

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Summary

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Rockstar

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Top School

Abel Braaksma is a seasoned software engineer and founder with over 20 years in IT, currently running Abrasoft and developing Exselt, a streaming .NET XSLT 3.0 processor largely implemented in F#. He brings deep expertise in language design and compiler development, having worked with languages from Smalltalk and Eiffel to C++, Java, C# and F#. Abel contributes to prominent open-source projects like the F# compiler and the TOML specification—improving build tooling, optimizing core string operations, and broadening international character support in grammar definitions. Based in Amsterdam, he combines hands-on engineering with software lifecycle management for business software, often tackling low-level performance and tooling challenges few engineers enjoy. His background in both formal language work and practical enterprise systems gives him a rare blend of theoretical rigor and production-focused delivery.

10 years of coding experience

4 years of employment as a software developer

Ir (master), Ir (master) at University of Amsterdam

VWO (Gymnasium), VWO (Gymnasium) at Cornelis Drebbel College

VWO diploma, VWO diploma at Adriaan Roland Holstcollege

School voor Journalistiek

Github Skills (14)

text-manipulation10

fsharp10

strings10

performance-optimization10

unicode10

compiler-development10

toml10

net9

specification9

lang9

dotnet9

functional-programming9

asp-net9

lexical-analysis8

Programming languages (13)

C#JavaC++CTeXGoHTMLTypeScript

Github contributions (5)

toml-lang/toml

Mar 2022 - Aug 2022

Tom's Obvious, Minimal Language

Role in this project:

Back-end Developer

Contributions:50 reviews, 22 commits, 1 PR in 5 months

Contributions summary:Abel primarily contributed to refining the grammar definition for the TOML language specification. Their work involved modifying the ABNF (Augmented Backus-Naur Form) grammar file, toml.abnf, to allow for more international characters in unquoted keys. They also fixed typos, removed unnecessary characters, and included specific Unicode characters in the key names, enhancing the language's usability and flexibility.

tomtomlconfiguration-fileini

dotnet/fsharp

Mar 2021 - Aug 2022

The F# compiler, F# core library, F# language service, and F# tooling integration for Visual Studio

Role in this project:

Back-end Developer & Automation Engineer

Contributions:31 reviews, 2 commits, 38 PRs in 1 year 5 months

Contributions summary:Abel primarily focused on improving the F# compiler and associated tooling, indicated by the various fixes to the build process and the integration of the compiler. They addressed build errors, improved VS2017 tool detection, and added checks to the update-vsintegration.cmd script. Furthermore, the user also enhanced performance by optimizing string manipulation operations within the FSharp.Core library, including String.length, String.concat, String.mapi and String.filter.

dotnetfunctional-programmingfsharplanguage-servicecore-library

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