Maxwell Bernstein
Senior Staff Software Engineer at Shopify
Boston, Massachusetts, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolMaxwell Bernstein is a Senior Staff Software Engineer in Boston with 14 years of systems- and runtime-focused experience, currently driving Ruby performance improvements at Shopify and teaching/consulting on compilers and security at Dartmouth. He has deep hands-on expertise in language tooling and VM work—contributing to ReasonML’s refmt, extending CPython’s test suite, and building a C VM—alongside production runtime improvements for large platforms like Instagram and Meta. Maxwell blends rigorous QA and test automation skills with backend systems engineering, and is known for pragmatic tooling contributions (e.g., adding in-place/output options and cmdliner support to refmt). Outside of code he’s an avid baker and cyclist, a detail that surfaces his methodical, craft-oriented approach to engineering.
15 years of coding experience
8 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor's degree Informatik, Bachelor's degree Informatik at University of TübingenBachelor’s Degree Computer Science, Bachelor’s Degree Computer Science at Tufts UniversityHigh School, High School at Palo Alto High
English, Spanish, German
Stackoverflow
10,800reputation
2.4mreached
98answers
164questions
Github Skills (31)
code-formatting10
python10
testing10
stack10
command-line-interface10
virtual-machine10
c1110
plugin10
reasonml10
ocaml10
ruby10
c1710
stackage10
jekyll10
command-line10
Programming languages (36)
Github contributions (5)
tekknolagi/carp
Feb 2014 - Jan 2021
"interesting" VM in C. Let's see how this goes.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:419 commits, 1 PR, 7 pushes in 7 years
Contributions summary:Maxwell appears to be developing a virtual machine (VM) in C. They added an increment instruction to the instruction set and a "show" instruction. Further work includes implementing function pointers within the VM, suggesting a focus on modularity and code organization. Later commits involve expanding the instruction set, including basic arithmetic and stack operations, demonstrating a clear focus on the core functionality of the VM.
letinteresting
reasonml/reason
Jan 2017 - Mar 2017
Simple, fast & type safe code that leverages the JavaScript & OCaml ecosystems
Role in this project:Full-stack Developer
Full-stack DeveloperContributions:3 releases, 80 commits, 42 PRs in 2 months
Contributions summary:Maxwell primarily contributed to the ReasonML project by making improvements to the `refmt` tool, which is used for code formatting. Their work included cleaning up whitespace, making spacing and parentheses more consistent, and adding new features like the `--output` and `--in-place` options. They also added version information to the refmt output and implemented the use of Cmdliner for command-line argument parsing and updated tests.
javascriptocamltypesafereasonmlprogramming-language
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