Tom Hebb - Software Engineer at Meta

Tom Hebb

Software Engineer at Meta

Canada

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Summary

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Rockstar

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Top School

Tom Hebb is a software engineer with 14 years of experience specializing in security, low-level programming, and embedded systems. Currently at Meta, he blends production-grade backend engineering with deep expertise in reverse engineering and filesystem and hardware-level tooling. His open-source contributions span high-profile projects like OpenBMC, the Sway compositor, and btrfs userspace tools, where he’s fixed critical bugs, refactored complex logic, and improved stability and observability. Tom’s background includes latency-sensitive C systems work and teaching systems programming, giving him both practical performance optimization skills and the ability to explain tricky concepts. He’s comfortable across the stack—from kernel-adjacent tooling and USB/sysfs interrogation to Wayland UI styling—often favoring pragmatic refactors that simplify long-lived code. Based in Canada, he remains intermittently active in open source, bringing a security-minded, low-level perspective to production systems.

14 years of coding experience

Bachelor’s Degree, Computer Science, Bachelor’s Degree, Computer Science at Tufts University

Computer Science, Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University

Stackoverflow

Stats

1,101reputation

75kreached

6answers

0questions

Github Skills (59)

bootloader10

filesystem10

composition10

btrfs10

scripting10

r10

css10

linux10

usb10

c1110

ws10

power-management10

c1710

script10

gtk10

Programming languages (22)

JavaC++RustCMakefileHandlebarsTwigGo

Github contributions (5)

swaywm/sway

Apr 2020 - Feb 2022

i3-compatible Wayland compositor

Role in this project:

Back-end Developer

Contributions:8 commits, 8 PRs, 11 comments in 1 year 10 months

Contributions summary:Tom focused on improving the core functionality and stability of the sway compositor. They addressed critical bugs, such as fixing text color issues and resolving crashes related to Wayland interactions. Furthermore, they enhanced the information provided by the compositor by adding view shell information to the JSON description. The user's contributions also involved refactoring and utilizing new wlroots API for keyboard and pointer focus management.

compositorwaylandwayland-compositor

gregkh/usbutils

Aug 2020 - Apr 2021

USB utilities for Linux, including lsusb

Role in this project:

Back-end Developer

Contributions:5 commits, 2 PRs, 1 comment in 7 months

Contributions summary:Tom's contributions primarily involve enhancing the `lsusb` utility. They refactored and improved how device information, including vendor, product, and serial numbers, is obtained. The user addressed a bug related to incorrect data retrieval for devices connected behind a hub by updating the method used to obtain the device's path in the system. These changes focus on reading USB properties from the sysfs file system and ensuring accurate device identification.

linuxusb

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