Han Vakil
Software Engineer at NewGrid
Berkeley, California, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolHan Vakil is a software engineer based in Berkeley with nine years of hands-on experience building and improving backend systems, currently working at NewGrid. He contributes to high-profile open-source projects like Node.js and llnode, where his work on worker threads, buffer memory leaks, and V8 compatibility has improved runtime performance and postmortem debugging for real-world Node processes. Comfortable across product and infrastructure domains, he has experience from startup co-founding to R&D internships and even rocket design contracting, reflecting a breadth of practical engineering curiosity. A high-achieving Olin graduate (3.89 GPA), he blends low-level systems insight with pragmatic delivery—often surfacing niche fixes (e.g., version-specific conditional logic and build optimizations) that meaningfully reduce startup time and improve diagnostics.
9 years of coding experience
2 years of employment as a software developer
Arlington high schoolBachelor of Science - BS, Computer Software Engineering, 3.89, Bachelor of Science - BS, Computer Software Engineering, 3.89 at Franklin W. Olin College of Engineering
Github Skills (14)
v810
javascript10
c-language10
nodejs10
runtimes10
cprogramming-language10
performance-optimization10
test-automation10
testing10
concurrency9
worker-threads9
memory-management9
buffer8
git8
Programming languages (11)
Github contributions (5)
nodejs/llnode
Aug 2022 - Oct 2022
An lldb plugin for Node.js and V8, which enables inspection of JavaScript states for insights into Node.js processes and their core dumps.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer & Test Automation Engineer
Back-end Developer & Test Automation EngineerContributions:1 review, 28 commits, 10 PRs in 1 month
Contributions summary:Han primarily contributed to the `llnode` project by addressing compatibility issues with different Node.js versions, specifically v16 and v18. They modified and removed tests to align with changes in the V8 engine and deprecated features. Additionally, the user implemented changes to postmortem data handling and optimized the build process by improving installation without sparse-checkout. The contributions included bug fixes, timeout adjustments, and version-specific conditional logic.
inspectionlldbnode-jsjavascriptdebugging
nodejs/node
May 2022 - Oct 2022
Node.js JavaScript runtime ✨🐢🚀✨
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:39 reviews, 58 commits, 52 PRs in 5 months
Contributions summary:Han primarily contributed to the core Node.js runtime, focusing on bug fixes and performance improvements. Their commits addressed issues related to worker threads, memory leaks in the buffer module, and the removal of deprecated features. They also implemented changes to improve performance by removing unnecessary code cache copies, specifically targeting startup time. These contributions demonstrate a deep understanding of the Node.js internals.
windowsnode-jsjavascriptlinuxruntime
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