Josh Berdine is a software engineer based in London with 11 years of professional experience and a deep research background culminating in a PhD in Computer Science. He has worked across industry and research at Meta, Microsoft Research, and Skiplabs, combining systems-level expertise with practical product engineering. An active contributor to the OCaml ecosystem, he has improved the OCaml compiler/runtime and the popular ocamlformat tool, demonstrating attention to low-level performance, garbage collection behavior, and code formatting edge cases. Josh’s work spans runtime optimizations, AST handling, and tooling integration (including Emacs), reflecting both theoretical rigor and pragmatic craftsmanship. Less obvious: his career trajectory bridges long-form academic investigation and production-grade engineering, making him adept at translating deep technical ideas into reliable, maintainable code.
11 years of coding experience
19 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor’s Degree, Computer Science and Mathematics, Bachelor’s Degree, Computer Science and Mathematics at Syracuse University
Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.), Computer Science, Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.), Computer Science at Queen Mary University of London
Contributions:38 reviews, 269 commits, 263 PRs in 5 years 3 months
Contributions summary:Josh primarily contributed to the auto-formatting of OCaml code. Their commits focused on enhancing the formatting of the Abstract Syntax Tree (AST), addressing issues related to parenthesization, the spacing of operators and arguments, and the placement of comments within the code. They also introduced improvements for specific code constructs such as let bindings, module expressions, and string literals, ensuring consistent and correct formatting. Furthermore, they implemented features to improve the Emacs integration and introduced new options like --escape-chars to manage string literal escapes.
The core OCaml system: compilers, runtime system, base libraries
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Contributions:22 reviews, 4 commits, 16 PRs in 4 months
Contributions summary:Josh primarily contributed to the OCaml core system, focusing on bug fixes and optimizations within the standard library and runtime. Their work involved addressing documentation typos, refining core functionality related to ephemerons and weak hash tables, and improving the efficiency of the `Weak` module. They also made updates to the OCAMLPARAM environment variable handling and implemented a test case to validate the garbage collection behavior. These changes indicate a deep understanding of the OCaml runtime and standard library.
functional-languagecompilersruntime-systemapllwt
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