Michael Ficarra
Distinguished Engineer at F5
Colorado, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolMichael Ficarra is a Distinguished Engineer with 16 years of experience building secure, standards-compliant JavaScript tooling and language infrastructure from Colorado. He has driven core contributions to widely used projects such as ESLint and the ECMAScript specification and test suites, blending deep language-level expertise with practical engineering across compilers, linters, and AST tooling. At F5 and Shape Security he has led architecture and principal engineering efforts focused on robust, secure systems, bringing both hands-on development and security sensibilities to product-scale problems. His open-source work spans CoffeeScript, PureScript, escodegen, and web security specs, reflecting a rare mix of compiler craftsmanship, test automation, and specification editing. Colleagues rely on him for subtle correctness fixes—string handling, surrogate pairs, and edge-case semantics—that quietly improve reliability across the JavaScript ecosystem.
16 years of coding experience
13 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor of Science, Computer Science, Bachelor of Science, Computer Science at Worcester Polytechnic Institute
Stackoverflow
29reputation
953reached
1answer
0questions
Github Skills (58)
astm10
unit-testing10
parserator10
go-modules10
static-code-analysis10
compiled-language10
javascript10
parser10
content-security-policy10
utilities10
lib10
s510
coffeescript10
sec10
web-application-security10
Programming languages (24)
Github contributions (5)
michaelficarra/CoffeeScriptRedux
Jun 2012 - Dec 2015
:sweat: rewrite of the CoffeeScript compiler with proper compiler design principles and a focus on robustness and extensibility
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:626 commits, 14 PRs, 13 pushes in 3 years 6 months
Contributions summary:Michael significantly contributed to the implementation of the CoffeeScript Redux compiler, focusing on compiler design principles, robustness, and extensibility. Their work included adding support for new control flow operators, such as `until`, and implementing core functionality for handling assignment expressions, operator precedence, and string interpolations. Further contributions involved enhancing the language grammar to support new syntax for class definitions and function expressions.
compilercompiler-designextensibility
estools/esquery
Oct 2013 - Feb 2021
ECMAScript AST query library.
Role in this project:Full-stack Developer
Full-stack DeveloperContributions:26 reviews, 57 commits, 46 PRs in 7 years 5 months
Contributions summary:Michael primarily refactored and enhanced the `esquery` library, focusing on improving its core functionality. They implemented fixes for field implementations, ensuring more robust attribute selector matching, and updated the codebase with consistent styling. Furthermore, they addressed bugs related to descendant selectors and refined the implementation of sibling, adjacent, and nth-child matching, while also improving code readability through the addition of comments.
ecmascriptastestreejavascript
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