Tom Hvitved
Staff Software Engineer at GitHub
Copenhagen, Capital Region of Denmark
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolTom Hvitved is a Staff Software Engineer based in Copenhagen with seven years of industry experience and a deep academic background, including a PhD and M.Sc. in Computer Science from the University of Copenhagen. He has been central to Semmle's transition into GitHub, evolving from research engineer to staff-level roles where he drives code quality and backend improvements. Tom contributes to high-profile open-source security tooling—working on GitHub's CodeQL to streamline and refactor core query logic and remove redundant Ruby code—which underpins large-scale code scanning and security research. He blends research-led rigor from his academic career with pragmatic engineering, focusing on maintainability and performance in complex codebases. Colleagues know him for quietly improving developer tooling and for a knack for spotting and eliminating subtle, redundant abstractions that yield measurable performance gains.
7 years of coding experience
10 years of employment as a software developer
Ribe KatedralskoleM.Sc., Computer Science, M.Sc., Computer Science at Københavns Universitet / University of Copenhagen
Danish, English
Github Skills (4)
refactor10
software-quality10
refactoring10
ruby10
Programming languages (7)
Github contributions (5)
github/codeql
Aug 2018 - Dec 2022
CodeQL: the libraries and queries that power security researchers around the world, as well as code scanning in GitHub Advanced Security
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer & Code Quality Engineer
Back-end Developer & Code Quality EngineerContributions:3182 reviews, 2477 commits, 1968 PRs in 4 years 5 months
Contributions summary:Tom primarily contributed to improving code quality within the CodeQL codebase by removing redundant code and streamlining core functionalities, specifically related to Ruby code. They focused on removing canonical return nodes from various QL files. They were involved in refactoring code across multiple files to improve performance.
github-advanced-securitysecurity-toolsgithub-security-labsecurity-researcherssecurity
hvitved/codeql
Oct 2018 - Dec 2022
Contributions:253 commits, 7 PRs, 3397 pushes in 4 years 2 months
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