Isaac Van Bakel
Doctoral Student at Department of Computer Science (D-INFK), ETH Zürich
London, England, United Kingdom
Summary
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Senior🎓
Top SchoolIsaac Van Bakel is a doctoral student at ETH Zürich's Programming Language Foundations lab with nine years of software engineering experience, primarily in Haskell and formal verification. He transitioned from hands-on backend roles at London startups like Supercede and Habito to research-focused work, blending practical engineering with theoretical rigour. Isaac has contributed to widely used open-source Haskell projects such as Yesod, improving idempotent APIs and test coverage for meta tag handling—an example of attention to both robustness and developer ergonomics. He holds a first-class Master's in Maths and Computer Science from Imperial College London and has taught undergraduates there, reflecting strong communication and mentoring skills. Notably, his background spans industry-grade product development and language-theoretic research, positioning him to bridge proof-oriented programming and real-world systems.
9 years of coding experience
3 years of employment as a software developer
Master's degree, Maths and Computer Science, First, Master's degree, Maths and Computer Science, First at Imperial College London
Italian, English, Dutch, German
Stackoverflow
1,812reputation
66kreached
59answers
13questions
Github Skills (10)
web-framework10
yesod10
haskell10
html9
rust6
dependent-types6
haskell-stack6
hash6
idris6
ghc6
Programming languages (18)
Github contributions (5)
yesodweb/yesod
Apr 2022 - Apr 2022
A RESTful Haskell web framework built on WAI.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:5 commits, 2 PRs in 1 day
Contributions summary:Isaac primarily focused on enhancing the `yesod-core` Haskell web framework by addressing functionality related to meta descriptions and page titles. They implemented idempotent versions of the `setDescription` API, adding warnings for the existing non-idempotent behavior and ensuring multiple calls to `setDescriptionIdemp` have the desired effect. Furthermore, the user added tests to verify the idempotency of `setTitle` and `setDescription` within the test suite. They also fixed a typo in the meta tag layout.
apirestfulhaskellframeworkwebframework
ivanbakel/rliterate
Sep 2018 - Dec 2018
Contributions:101 commits, 15 pushes, 1 branch in 3 months
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