Philip Hofer
Chief Technology Officer at hoxbio
Seattle, Washington United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolPhilip Hofer is a CTO based in Seattle with 12 years of engineering experience combining systems-level rigor and product leadership. He has deep hands-on expertise in back-end and compiler work—contributing optimizations to the Go compiler (notably ARM64 codegen and SSA passes) that reduced binary size and improved performance—and improving robustness in foundational projects like the OpenRC init system. Comfortable moving between architecture and code, he’s also implemented and hardened serialization tooling in Go (msgp) and routinely fixes low-level bugs such as buffer overflows and null dereferences. With dual technical and business degrees from the University of Michigan, he brings a pragmatic mix of computational physics discipline and business sensibility to scaling resilient infrastructure.
12 years of coding experience
Interdisciplinary Physics (B.S.), Computational Physics, Interdisciplinary Physics (B.S.), Computational Physics at University of MichiganBachelor of Business Administration (B.B.A.), Bachelor of Business Administration (B.B.A.) at University of Michigan - Stephen M. Ross School of BusinessHigh School Diploma, High School Diploma at Phillips Academy
Github Skills (32)
algorithm10
algorithms10
system-programming10
buffer-overflow10
architecture10
testing10
ssa10
linux10
data-serialization10
c1110
decode10
decoding10
serialization10
c1710
code-generation10
Programming languages (7)
Github contributions (5)
tinylib/msgp
Sep 2014 - Dec 2022
A Go code generator for MessagePack / msgpack.org[Go]
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:9 releases, 24 reviews, 337 commits in 8 years 4 months
Contributions summary:Philip contributed to the `tinylib/msgp` repository, which is a Go code generator for MessagePack. Their work primarily focused on implementing and testing encoding and decoding functionality. The commits included adding and testing map headers and array headers, fixing array masks, and adding tests for writing various data types like nil, float64, float32, int64, uint64, and bytes. Additional work included fixing issues with handling integer values and string encoding.
golangmsgpackcode-generatormessagepackgo
golang/go
May 2015 - Jul 2023
The Go programming language
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:79 comments, 17 issues in 8 years 2 months
Contributions summary:Philip primarily focused on optimizing the Go compiler's code generation and SSA (Static Single Assignment) optimization passes. Their work involved refactoring and rewriting code for performance improvements, specifically targeting the ARM64 architecture. They also identified and fixed issues related to interface call de-virtualization and constant pointer comparisons, demonstrating a deep understanding of compiler internals and code optimization techniques for the Go language. The user's commits resulted in reduced binary size and improved benchmark performance in several areas.
golanggopluscompilerprogramming-languageinterpreter
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