Samantha Mcvey
Software Engineer at MoarVM
Amsterdam, North Holland, Netherlands
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolSamantha Mcvey is a software engineer with nine years of experience specializing in security engineering and data protection at Booking.com, where she architects PKI, secret storage (HashiCorp Vault), and GDPR-compliant PII/tokenization systems. She combines production security work with deep systems and compiler expertise as a long-time core developer on MoarVM and the Raku language, contributing Unicode collation, string/encoding handling, and VM ops. Her open-source contributions span both backend compiler work and developer tooling—she led the switch to a JavaScript-based syntax highlighter for Raku’s documentation and improved search with Levenshtein enhancements. Comfortable across C, Perl, and modern backend stacks, she focuses on correctness, performance, and cryptographic standards, having authored Booking.com’s company-wide Encryption Standard Policy. Based in Amsterdam, she brings a pragmatic blend of infrastructure, devops, and language-runtime knowledge that surfaces in both secure production systems and low-level open-source projects. An understated strength is her track record of improving text and Unicode handling in real-world VMs—work that quietly benefits many language users.
9 years of coding experience
1 year of employment as a software developer
None, Chemistry, None, Chemistry at UC Santa Barbara
Github Skills (28)
javascript10
strings10
compiler-development10
text-manipulation10
nqp10
c1110
c1710
regular-expression10
zshrc10
editorconfig10
unicode10
raku10
shell10
zsh10
documentation10
Programming languages (23)
Github contributions (5)
MoarVM/MoarVM
Dec 2016 - Jan 2022
A VM with adaptive optimization and JIT compilation, built for Rakudo
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer & Compiler Engineer
Back-end Developer & Compiler EngineerContributions:4 reviews, 770 commits, 158 PRs in 5 years 1 month
Contributions summary:Samantha primarily contributed to the MoarVM project by implementing and enhancing features related to the Unicode Collation Algorithm. The user added code for processing Unicode collation weights to the project, including support for variable-level collation and handling of different collation modes. The user also performed code cleanup, optimized the string search algorithm by using a grapheme iterator, and fixed bugs to ensure the correct behavior of string comparison operations related to unicode text.
rakudocompilationjitrakuadaptive
Raku/doc
Nov 2016 - Oct 2018
🦋 Raku documentation
Role in this project:Full-stack Developer
Full-stack DeveloperContributions:162 commits, 4 PRs, 136 pushes in 1 year 11 months
Contributions summary:Samantha primarily focused on improving the Raku documentation generation process. Their contributions involved refactoring the syntax highlighting system by transitioning from pygments to highlights, a Javascript-based highlighter. They debugged and enhanced the highlights integration, and also worked on the build process including the CSS styling. They also worked on improving the search functionality with levenshtein distance and fixed javascript syntax.
documentation-generatorrakureferencedocumentation-site
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