Max Brunsfeld

Portland, Oregon, United States

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Summary

🤩

Rockstar

Max Brunsfeld is a software engineer and co-founder based in Portland, Oregon with 15 years of experience building developer tools and collaborative editors. He co-founded Zed to reinvent real-time, high-performance code editing and previously led major engineering work on Atom and Tree-sitter at GitHub, authoring parsers for ~15 languages that power syntax highlighting and code navigation across platforms. Max blends back-end systems work—cross-language bindings, build systems, and parser integrations—with front-end editor UX improvements, evidenced by extensive contributions to Atom packages like find-and-replace, fuzzy-finder, and language grammars. He’s comfortable across languages and runtimes (Rust, Go, Node, Python, WebAssembly) and has deep expertise in parsing, editor internals, and performance optimization. Beyond product code, he has a track record of refactoring legacy systems, writing robust tests, and improving cross-platform build tooling. His scientific beginnings in physics and research tooling hint at a pragmatic, measurement-driven approach to engineering.

16 years of coding experience

Stackoverflow

Stats

361reputation

78kreached

6answers

0questions

Github Skills (81)

atom-editor10

parser10

cargo10

python10

testing10

windows10

autocomplete10

c1110

cocoa10

ruby10

c1710

fuzzy-finder10

highlighter10

code-generation10

build-automation10

Programming languages (33)

CHandlebarsWebAssemblyGoHTMLFreeMarkerReasonFortran

Github contributions (5)

atom/language-c

Dec 2014 - Jun 2019

C support in Atom

Role in this project:

Front-end Developer & Automation Engineer

Contributions:78 commits, 5 PRs, 44 pushes in 4 years 6 months

Contributions summary:Max primarily contributed to the Atom text editor's C and C++ language support, focusing on enhancing the grammar and syntax highlighting. They made changes to the grammar files, including implementing tree-sitter grammars for C and C++, which involved defining scopes and keywords. The user also worked on improving the editor's indentation behavior and created an injection point for highlighting preprocessor directives within macro definitions.

atomtextmatesyntax-highlighting

tree-sitter/node-tree-sitter

Mar 2014 - Oct 2022

Node.js bindings for tree-sitter

Role in this project:

Back-end Developer

Contributions:47 releases, 3 reviews, 528 commits in 8 years 9 months

Contributions summary:Max primarily worked on developing the core functionality for Node.js bindings for the tree-sitter parsing library. Their commits involve implementing code to compile grammars, define rules, and convert grammar properties to symbol rules using C++. The user also added methods for the AST node interface and exposed debugging options for parse and lexing, as well as adding methods to improve walking the AST. These contributions were focused on enabling and extending the core parsing capabilities of the library.

nodejstree-sitterbindingjavascript

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