Behdad Esfahbod
Film Producer at Behdad Esfahbod
Edmonton, Alberta, Canada
Summary
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Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolBehdad Esfahbod is an Iranian-Canadian software engineer with two decades of experience specializing in fonts, text rendering, Unicode, and performance engineering. He has driven core improvements at Google and Facebook and is a long-time maintainer in the GNOME ecosystem, contributing critical fixes and optimizations to projects like HarfBuzz and GLib. His open-source work includes deep, low-level contributions to widely used font tooling such as FontTools and fontmake, improving CFF/GPOS handling and glyph subsetting that benefit millions of users and downstream projects. Based in Edmonton, he pairs an MSc in Computer Science and an MBA from the University of Toronto with hands-on systems engineering and build/release automation experience (e.g., OSS-Fuzz and Emscripten). Beyond code, he produces documentary and narrative films exploring mental health, bringing a rare blend of technical rigor and human-centered storytelling to his work. This mix of core infrastructure impact, performance focus, and creative practice makes him a distinctive contributor in both engineering and film.
20 years of coding experience
20 years of employment as a software developer
MBA, MBA at University of Toronto - Rotman School of ManagementMSc. Computer Science, MSc. Computer Science at University of TorontoBSc Computer Engineering, BSc Computer Engineering at Sharif University of Technology
Stackoverflow
356reputation
9kreached
12answers
0questions
Github Skills (44)
algorithm10
glut10
algorithms10
javascript10
opentype10
c-language10
character-encoding10
strings10
python10
text-manipulation10
fonttools10
c1110
data-structure10
c1710
optmization10
Programming languages (27)
Github contributions (5)
harfbuzz/harfbuzz
Nov 2005 - Jan 2023
HarfBuzz text shaping engine
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer & Performance Engineer
Back-end Developer & Performance EngineerContributions:51 releases, 518 reviews, 10617 commits in 17 years 5 months
Contributions summary:Behdad focused on performance optimizations and bug fixes within the HarfBuzz text shaping engine, primarily targeting the CFF (Compact Font Format) and GPOS (Glyph Positioning) modules. Their contributions improved the efficiency of glyph subsetting operations, particularly in CFF1 and CFF2 font formats, addressing issues related to glyph ID and SID mapping, and string writing. The user also implemented various micro-optimizations aimed at speeding up key operations.
aatharfbuzzc-plus-plusfontstext-shaping
googlefonts/fontmake
Mar 2016 - Apr 2021
Compile fonts from sources (UFO, Glyphs) to binary (OpenType, TrueType).
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:10 commits, 4 PRs, 8 pushes in 5 years 1 month
Contributions summary:Behdad primarily contributed to the backend functionality of the fontmake project. Their work involved refactoring code, such as making a method a static method and optimizing performance by avoiding the recreation of objects. They also fixed critical bugs related to font compilation, specifically addressing issues with GSUB/GPOS/GDEF tables, and improved the handling of mti-sources, enhancing the project's reliability. Finally, they addressed a pip install error.
glyphsgoogle-fontsfontvariable-fontsfonts
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