Paul Backus
Teacher at The Charter School of San Diego
San Diego, California, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolPaul Backus is an experienced educator and technically curious developer based in San Diego, blending 12 years of K–12 teaching and curriculum development with hands-on contributions to open-source compiler projects. Currently teaching independent study through Altus-affiliated schools, he won Secondary Teacher of the Year in Carlsbad (2021) and holds a MAT and a BA in Literary Journalism from UC Irvine. Paul augments classroom practice with CTE credentials in Energy, ICT, and Child Development and recent coursework in computer science, bringing real-world data and remediation experience from prior environmental engineering work. On GitHub he has made substantive back-end contributions to the D language ecosystem—fixing compiler bugs, improving error messages, and refining Phobos standard library code—demonstrating comfort with low-level systems and testing. He’s equally at home designing differentiated science lessons and debugging compiler internals, a mix that fuels practical, student-centered tech integration.
11 years of coding experience
Master of Arts, Teaching, Master of Arts, Teaching at University of California, Irvine
Github Skills (21)
debug10
programming-language10
llvm10
dword10
standard-library10
compiler-compiler10
dmd10
dt10
compiler10
testing9
algorithms9
traits9
lang9
natives8
type-conversion8
Programming languages (11)
Github contributions (5)
dlang/phobos
Nov 2018 - Dec 2022
The standard library of the D programming language
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:147 reviews, 65 commits, 99 PRs in 4 years 1 month
Contributions summary:Paul contributed to the D programming language's standard library, Phobos, by fixing bugs and implementing new features. Their work includes adding grammar elements to the format string, fixing issues related to the algebraic types and ReplaceType bugs. They also refactored and simplified existing code.
c-programmingmetatype-conversionphoneticsglossary
ldc-developers/ldc
Jan 2020 - Sep 2022
The LLVM-based D Compiler.
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:45 commits in 2 years 8 months
Contributions summary:Paul primarily contributed to the LDC D compiler by fixing various bugs and improving the code quality. Their work included addressing issues related to copy constructors, struct initialization, and handling of external functions. The user also updated the compiler's internal code to align with language specifications. Furthermore, they improved the error messages to aid debugging.
compilerldcdlangllvmd
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