Max Heiber
Software Engineer, Hack Language Team And WhatsApp Erlang Team
London, England, United Kingdom
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolMax Heiber is a software engineer with 12 years of experience building end-to-end systems and language tools, currently contributing to both the Hack language team and WhatsApp’s Erlang team at Meta. He co-wrote a production Erlang type checker from scratch—bringing it to ~80% adoption—and has implemented advanced type-system features, static analyses, and IDE/CI integrations. A strong backend systems developer, he’s made notable open-source contributions to HHVM (Hack VM) and to Redisearch, improving bytecode type-checking, Unicode trie support, and code quality across large codebases. His background spans infrastructure, build tooling, and developer ergonomics from Bloomberg to startups, pairing formal CS training (MS, Georgia Tech) with philosophy pedagogy that sharpens his emphasis on clear specification and error reporting. He prefers solving problems that connect developer intent to reliable production behavior, and often brings unusual cross-disciplinary rigor to language and tooling work.
12 years of coding experience
6 years of employment as a software developer
Master of Science (M.S.), Computer Science, Master of Science (M.S.), Computer Science at Georgia Institute of TechnologyThe University of Maryland, College ParkComputer Science, Computer Science at EdXBachelor of Arts (B.A.), Anthropology, Bachelor of Arts (B.A.), Anthropology at The University of Connecticut
English, Spanish, Chinese
Stackoverflow
14,942reputation
5.0mreached
88answers
213questions
jquery
top-5%
debugging
top-5%
websocket
top-1%
pipe
top-5%
google-chrome
top-5%
javascript
top-1%
Github Skills (26)
search-engine10
javascript10
dropdown-menu10
redis10
hacking10
websocket10
c1110
c1710
php10
unicode10
debugging9
jquery9
software-quality9
tostring9
pipe9
Programming languages (28)
Github contributions (5)
facebook/hhvm
Aug 2020 - Jan 2023
A virtual machine for executing programs written in Hack.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:58 commits, 1 PR, 2 comments in 2 years 4 months
Contributions summary:Max made significant contributions to the HHVM project, focusing on the backend aspects of the Hack virtual machine. The user's work included implementing functionality to ban instance properties on abstract final classes, abstracting over string representation using `Cow`, and taking on Rust Clippy suggestions to improve code quality. They also addressed a bug related to readonly-checking with yield expressions, and ensured readonly checking for the *key* in a yield expression.
hacklangphpvirtual-machineprogramshhvm
RediSearch/RediSearch
Dec 2016 - Feb 2017
A query and indexing engine for Redis, providing secondary indexing, full-text search, vector similarity search and aggregations.
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:17 commits, 9 PRs, 39 comments in 1 month
Contributions summary:Max primarily focused on refactoring and improving the codebase related to the trie data structure and its associated utility functions within the Redisearch project. Their contributions involved fixing typos, removing unnecessary code, and refactoring the rune_util module for improved efficiency. The user also implemented and tested unicode support for the trie data structure and its related functionalities, including auto-complete functionality. These changes significantly enhance the robustness and usability of the search functionality in Redisearch.
redis-modulefulltextindexingredis-searchtext-search
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