John Kessenich
SPIR-V Specification Author And Editor
Fort Collins, Colorado, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolJohn Kessenich is a veteran GPU languages and compilers expert with 15+ years leading specification work at the Khronos Group, where he authors SPIR-V and edited the GLSL specification. His career spans industry and tooling roles at Google, LunarG, Intel, 3Dlabs and HP, focused on shader compiler toolchains, Vulkan, and hardware-aligned compiler architectures. He is a hands-on contributor to the widely used Khronos SPIRV-Headers repository, synchronizing header files and adding enumerants for multiple extensions and vendor tokens to keep implementations interoperable. Based in Fort Collins with an MS in Mathematics, he combines rigorous formal specification skills with practical compiler engineering and a knack for translating evolving hardware features into stable, cross-vendor standards.
15 years of coding experience
35 years of employment as a software developer
MS, Mathematics, MS, Mathematics at Colorado State University
Github Skills (6)
c1710
header-files10
spirv10
c1110
enumeration10
opencl9
Programming languages (7)
Github contributions (5)
KhronosGroup/SPIRV-Headers
Jul 2016 - Jan 2023
SPIRV-Headers
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer & Technical Writer
Back-end Developer & Technical WriterContributions:2 reviews, 177 commits, 133 PRs in 6 years 7 months
Contributions summary:John primarily contributed to the SPIRV-Headers repository, focusing on updating and maintaining the header files. They revised header files for SPIRV 1.0, 1.1, and 1.2, and added new enumerants for various extensions, including SPV_KHR_shader_ballot, SPV_KHR_shader_draw_parameters, SPV_KHR_shader_atomic_counter_ops, SPV_KHR_shader_fragment_mask, and several Intel-specific tokens. Their work involved synchronizing with the specification, indicating a role focused on maintaining the accuracy and completeness of the SPIR-V definitions.
kebab-casegrammarheadersspirvabstract-syntax-tree
hrydgard/glslang
Feb 2016 - Sep 2016
Khronos reference front-end for GLSL and ESSL, and sample SPIR-V generator
Contributions:8 commits in 7 months
esslkhronosspir-vfront-endglsl
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