About Me
I am a talented software engineer and computer scientist. My interests include programming language implementation and performance, including parallelism and concurrency.
I work for Mozilla on the Firefox web-browser's site isolation project. Previously I worked on the JavaScript engine's garbage collector.
In my spare time I work on the new Plasma programming language, which aims to bring the worlds of functional and imperative programming together. By combining these programming aproaches Plasma will make it easier for teams to create large scale, reliable, high-performance parallel and concurrent software.
I also like to bake and cook, ski and play the flute. I also write about infertility and related issues.
Background
I started programming when I was 12 with QBasic, by the time I was 15 I was teaching myself C/C++. After high school I studied computer science at University then joined the work force full-time. Shortly afterwards I was introduced to functional programming; intoxicated by the safety of pure declarative languages and the challenge of multicore computing I decided to peruse a Ph.D. on this topic.
After completing my Ph.D. on Automatic Parallelisation for Mercury I re-joined the work force supporting Mercury (a logic-functional language) in production. I used the skills developed during my Ph.D. to analyse and improve the performance of Mercury programs. Now I work on the garbage collector in Firefox's JavaScript engine.
In mid-2015 I started work on the Plasma programming language in my spare time. Plasma is a pure declarative language. Its goals are to find a compromise between declarative and imperative programming and to provide state-of-the-art parallel and concurrent programming features.
When I'm programming, writing, reading or thinking about programming I like to spend time with my family, go alpine skiing and sometimes play the flute.
Recent blog posts
- — The right amount of poison
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Firefox poisons memory, but how much poison is the right amount?
- — Waiting for web content to do something in a Firefox mochitest
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How to write a Firefox test that waits for a tab to wait for a web worker and avoid (most) races.
- — Running the AWSY benchmark in the Firefox profiler
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A post for future me who may wish to profile AWSY again
- — Project MemShrink
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I’m starting a new project to reduce Firefox’s memory footprint
- — Case Sensitivity In Grammars
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A recent change to Plasma caused me to think choices that various languages make with regard to ambiguity in their grammar that is often resolved by case.
See all blog posts.
Publications
Presentations and interviews
The publications of this section include conference presentations, talks and other interviews. They are not academic / peer-reviewed those are in the section below, however they're probably more accessible for most readers. They're probably a good place to start for an overview of my work or reporting on other people's work.
- AST to WebAssembly: Writing a Code Generator Compose :: Melbourne Conference Melbourne, Australia Aug, 2018 Details…
- x86: An Evolution of Kludges Melbourne Haskell User Group Melbourne, Australia July, 2018 Details…
- Plasma Programming Language Linux Users of Victoria Melbourne, Australia May, 2017 Details…
- Tail recursion, do I have it? how to get it? Melbourne Functional User Group Melbourne, Australia Apr, 2017 Slides
- Playing with Prolog — Interviewee Playing with Prolog YouTube Channel Apr, 2017 YouTube video.
- Plasma Programming Language Compose :: Melbourne Conference Melbourne, Australia Aug, 2016 Details…
- Functional Geekery episode 60 — Interviewee Functional Geekery Podcast Jul, 2016 Audio and notes (functionalgeekery.com).
- Haskell Sucks! Melbourne Haskell User Group Melbourne, Australia Apr, 2016 Details…
- The Mercury Programming Language Melbourne Functional User Group Melbourne, Australia Apr, 2015 Details…
- Automatic Parallelism for Mercury Multicore World 2012 Wellington, New Zealand Mar, 2012 Details…
- Automatic Parallelism for Mercury Google Tech Talk & UNSW Seminar Sydney, Australia Dec, 2010 Slides
- Paul Bone goes Parallel with Project Mercury .Net Rocks! Podcast Jun, 2011 Details…
- Automatic Parallelism in Mercury Multicore Miniconf — Linuxconf 2010 Wellington, New Zealand Jan, 2010 Details…
Journal articles and conference papers
The publications in this section are academic papers (conference papers, journal articles and dissertations. They are more academically rigorous than the presentations above and have a lot more detail. They're useful if you're looking for detailed information about my work.
- The Logic of Insurance: an Ontology-Centric Pricing Application The 13th International Semantic Web Conference, Industry Track Riva del Garda, Italy October 19–23, 2014 Details…
- Automatic Parallelisation for Mercury PhD thesis Department of Computing and Information Systems, The University of Melbourne, Australia 2012 Details…
- Controlling Loops in Parallel Mercury Code Declarative Aspects and Applications of Multicore Programming Philadelphia, PA, USA 2012 Details…
- Profiling parallel Mercury programs with ThreadScope 21st Workshop on Logic-based methods in Programming Environments (WLPE 2011) pp. 32–46 Lexington, KY, USA 2011 Details…
- Estimating the overlap between dependent computations for automatic parallelization Theory and Practice of Logic Programming, 27th International. Conference on Logic Programming (ICLP 11) Special Issue, vol. 11, no. (4–5), pp. 575–587 2011 Details…
- Calculating likely Parallelism within Dependant Conjunctions for Logic Programs Honours Thesis, University of Melbourne Melbourne, Australia Oct. 2008 Details…
