Alexander McKenna
Software Engineer at Funding Circle
London, England, United Kingdom
Summary
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RockstarAlexander McKenna is a London-based software engineer with eight years’ experience and a passion for programming language theory and formal verification. A polyglot developer, he has made substantive backend contributions to the Clash compiler—translating Haskell to VHDL/Verilog/SystemVerilog—improving partial evaluation, adding enum support, and hardening automatic-differentiation primitives. He combines practical systems engineering with research-minded rigor, evident in his focus on tests and refactors that boost compiler robustness. Comfortable across languages and abstraction levels, Alexander brings both deep technical craft and an eye for correctness to complex tooling in hardware-oriented software stacks.
8 years of coding experience
Github Skills (6)
haskell10
vhdl9
code-generation9
verilog9
compiler8
testing8
Programming languages (9)
Github contributions (5)
clash-lang/clash-compiler
Nov 2019 - Dec 2022
Haskell to VHDL/Verilog/SystemVerilog compiler
Role in this project:
Backend Developer
Backend DeveloperContributions:2 releases, 345 reviews, 420 commits in 3 years 2 months
Contributions summary:Alexander primarily worked on the Clash language compiler, contributing to the core functionality of the HDL code generation. They focused on improving the partial evaluator's efficiency, added new features like handling enums, and fixed various bugs, specifically in the domain of automatic-differentiation and multi-result primitives. Their changes involved adding new tests and refactoring existing ones to improve the robustness of the compiler.
uvmasicvhdlsystemveriloghaskell
alex-mckenna/optimum
Jan 2019 - Jan 2019
Contributions:32 commits, 13 pushes, 1 branch in 11 days
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