Hisham Muhammad is a seasoned software engineer with 20+ years building systems-level tools, language runtimes, and distributed platforms from Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil. He’s the creator of influential open-source projects including htop, LuaRocks and GoboLinux, and has repeatedly combined deep C/Lua expertise with product and systems thinking while shaping Kong’s WebAssembly efforts in Rust and Wasm. His work spans low-level kernel-adjacent tooling and high-level architecture—designing package managers, language compilers, and dataflow engines—while also improving developer ergonomics via documentation and automation. At Kong he bridged engineering and product roles to ship WasmX/DataKit and streamline CI/CD for Docker releases, reflecting a rare full-stack, full-lifecycle skill set. Academically grounded with an MSc and PhD track in Computer Science and a history of lecturing and research, he brings both rigorous foundations and practical craftsmanship to complex infrastructure problems. An underrated strength is his sustained focus on clarity—clean docs, robust parsers and maintainable tooling—evident across long-lived community projects.
20 years of coding experience
18 years of employment as a software developer
B.Sc. Computer Science, B.Sc. Computer Science at Unisinos
htop is an interactive text-mode process viewer for Unix systems. It aims to be a better 'top'.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer & System Engineer
Contributions:938 commits, 199 PRs, 348 pushes in 14 years 8 months
Contributions summary:Hisham made significant contributions to the htop project, mainly focused on improving and extending the functionality of the process viewer. Their work included completing the implementation of the `--with-proc` feature to enhance FreeBSD compatibility, adding a header generator script, and fixing various issues related to header generation. Additionally, the user made changes related to the reading and accounting of system data, including CPU usage and IO statistics, and corrected the handling of process environment variables, showing a good understanding of system internals and data structures.
Contributions:17 releases, 57 reviews, 919 commits in 4 years
Contributions summary:Hisham primarily contributed to the Teal compiler, focusing on lexical and parsing improvements. They added support for features such as semicolons, hexadecimal constants, and numbered escapes within strings, and addressed parsing ambiguities. The user also improved error reporting, handled incomplete expressions, and refactored parts of the parser. The changes indicate a focus on improving the language's syntax and compiler robustness.
luadialecttealcompilertyped
Find and Hire Top DevelopersWe’ve analyzed the programming source code of over 60 million software developers on GitHub and scored them by 50,000 skills. Sign-up on Prog,AI to search for software developers.