Alan Pierce
Software Engineer at Benchling
San Francisco, California, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolAlan Pierce is a seasoned software engineer with 16 years of experience based in San Francisco, currently building product at Benchling. He blends deep back-end parsing expertise with high-performance front-end tool work—contributing to well-known open-source projects like CoffeeScript, decaffeinate, Sucrase, and react-codemod where he improved parser accuracy, error reporting, and JSX transforms. Alan’s contributions show a knack for solving subtle language-processing bugs (token locations, operator precedence, incomplete conditionals) and preserving developer intent (comments, formatting) during automated code transforms. Pragmatic and detail-oriented, he pairs rigorous test coverage with performance-minded implementations, making him equally comfortable touching AST internals and shipping fast JavaScript tooling.
16 years of coding experience
Carnegie Mellon University
Github Skills (22)
code-transformation10
javascript10
parser10
transcode10
coffeescript10
lexer10
testing10
typescript10
parsing10
parse10
transpiler10
typescript-types10
error-handling10
typescripts10
lex10
Programming languages (13)
Github contributions (5)
alangpierce/sucrase
Sep 2017 - Nov 2022
Super-fast alternative to Babel for when you can target modern JS runtimes
Role in this project:
Front-end Developer
Front-end DeveloperContributions:5 releases, 49 reviews, 650 commits in 5 years 2 months
Contributions summary:Alan appears to be primarily focused on implementing the JSX transform for a super-fast Babel alternative. Their contributions involve adding, refactoring, and testing core features of the transform, including the handling of JSX elements, attributes, children, and various edge cases. They have built a substantial set of tests that aim to ensure the fidelity of JSX transformation and also contribute to implementing new functionality related to JavaScript code.
super-fastbabelruntimesjavascriptbabel-plugin
decaffeinate/decaffeinate
Jun 2016 - May 2018
Goodbye CoffeeScript, hello JavaScript!
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:1 release, 398 commits, 777 PRs in 1 year 10 months
Contributions summary:Alan primarily contributed to improving the error reporting in the decaffeinate project. They enhanced the handling of parser errors, implemented functionality to prevent the removal of comments when empty return statements were removed, and ensured correct behavior when dealing with incomplete conditionals. These changes demonstrate a focus on the internal workings of the tool and improving its robustness.
decaffeinatejavascriptconversiontypescriptgoodbye
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