Owen Shepherd
Staff Compiler Research Engineer at .txt
Dublin, Ireland
Summary
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Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolOwen Shepherd is a Staff Compiler Research Engineer based in Dublin with a decade of experience building reliable, full‑stack systems grounded in strong compile‑time guarantees. He blends research and pragmatic engineering—working on parsing theory, compilers, and functional reactive programming—while shipping production improvements at companies from HubSpot to energy and trading consultancies. Notable open‑source work includes contributions to the Glasgow Haskell Compiler (GHC), where he adjusted binary serialization and interface handling, and optimizations to the kakoune-lsp client such as batching and selection formatting. Comfortable across backend systems and developer tooling, he prefers provable correctness and type-driven design to reduce runtime surprises. Colleagues rely on him for refactors that improve consistency and maintainability as much as for feature delivery.
10 years of coding experience
7 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor's degree Computer Science, Bachelor's degree Computer Science at Trinity College Dublin
English, French
Stackoverflow
791reputation
8kreached
24answers
3questions
Github Skills (31)
ls10
obelisk10
command-line-interface10
language-server-protocol10
full-stack10
compiler-design10
kakoune10
ghc10
rust10
haskell10
plugin9
nix9
build-system9
command-line9
cli9
Programming languages (26)
Github contributions (5)
kakoune-lsp/kakoune-lsp
May 2020 - May 2020
Kakoune Language Server Protocol Client
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:6 commits, 4 PRs, 6 comments in 3 days
Contributions summary:Owen primarily focused on enhancing the Kakoune Language Server Protocol (LSP) client. Their contributions include implementing batching for requests, a crucial optimization for performance. They also added support for selection formatting, a feature that improves the editing experience. Furthermore, the user refactored the code to leverage batch calls, squashing selection formatting history.
kakounelanguage-server-protocollsprustplugin
ghc/ghc
Oct 2022 - Oct 2022
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
Back-end DeveloperContributions:1 commit in 1 day
Contributions summary:Owen primarily focused on modifying binary serialization and deserialization logic within the Glasgow Haskell Compiler (GHC) codebase. They adapted existing code to remove source location information from interface files, impacting ABI hashes. They also updated documentation and type signatures, specifically within the `Data.List.NonEmpty` module, and added new functionality, increasing code consistency with other modules.
compilerghcgitlabhaskell
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