Matthew Pickering
Software Engineer at XBOW
Sheffield, England, United Kingdom
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolMatthew Pickering is an open-source community leader and senior engineer with 14 years of software experience and a deep specialty in the Haskell ecosystem. He has driven compiler and tooling improvements across GHC, haskell-language-server and related projects, ranking 5th on the all-time GHC contributor list and leading major community coordination and release efforts. Matthew blends compiler engineering (bytecode, type systems, optimizations) with practical tooling and CI architecture, having shipped runtime debuggers, profiling features, and large-scale pipeline automation. His contributions to prominent projects like Pandoc, Haddock and HLint show a knack for refactoring, robustness and test-driven improvements across readers, docs and refactoring rules. Based in Sheffield and holding a PhD in Computer Science, he pairs research-grade rigor with hands-on mentorship and stakeholder communication across distributed teams. An uncommon strength is his fluency in navigating both sensitive community dynamics and low-level compiler internals to deliver coordinated, on-time releases.
14 years of coding experience
MCompPhil, Computer Science and Philosophy, MCompPhil, Computer Science and Philosophy at University of OxfordQueen Elizabeth SchoolDoctor of Philosophy, Computer Science, Doctor of Philosophy, Computer Science at University of Bristol
French, English
Github Skills (36)
parser10
package-management10
apidoc10
textile10
software-quality10
refactor10
codegen10
api10
language-design10
performance-optimization10
bytecode10
template-haskell10
ghc10
html10
cabal10
Programming languages (25)
Github contributions (5)
ghc/ghc
Mar 2015 - Jan 2023
Mirror of the Glasgow Haskell Compiler. Please submit issues and patches to GHC's Gitlab instance (https://gitlab.haskell.org/ghc/ghc). First time contributors are encouraged to get started with the newcomers info (https://gitlab.haskell.org/ghc/ghc/wikis/contributing).
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer & Compiler Engineer
Back-end Developer & Compiler EngineerContributions:2233 commits, 1 PR, 17 comments in 7 years 11 months
Contributions summary:Matthew primarily contributed to the compiler engineering, specifically focusing on optimizations and fixes within the bytecode assembler and type family processing. The user's commits involved in-depth code improvements to the core compiler, along with fixes for issues impacting the interface files and related bytecode generation. They also added test cases, further demonstrating a focus on enhancing and stabilising the compiler's functionality. The changes improved the performance of the compiler.
compilerghcgitlabhaskell
ghc-proposals/ghc-proposals
Jan 2018 - Jun 2022
Proposed compiler and language changes for GHC and GHC/Haskell
Role in this project:Backend Developer
Backend DeveloperContributions:47 reviews, 37 commits, 13 PRs in 4 years 5 months
Contributions summary:Matthew contributed to the `ghc-proposals/ghc-proposals` repository by authoring and revising proposals for GHC compiler and language changes. Their work focused on designing and refining new language features such as overloaded quotation, deep subsumption, and function result type signatures, as well as implementing proposals like hex floats and type applications. The user engaged in refactoring and addressing feedback, demonstrating an ability to implement complex features and work on language design.
compilerghchaskell
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