I’m Max Bernstein.
I am a human and programmer. I like to read books, take photos, and ride bikes in the hills near my house. I tweet things (and toot things) about bread, legumes, and compilers. Right now, I am a software engineer working on compilers at Shopify and a Hacker in Residence at the Dartmouth College computer science department. I did a half-batch of Recurse Center (Fall 2 2024) and really enjoyed it.
You can email me if you so desire. I’m happy to talk about education, programming languages, cycling, and more.
I like making things.
That’s probably an understatement. Here are some of my favorite projects:
- The National Malware Association, an organization focused on security and education
- scrapscript.py, an implementation of the Scrapscript language. Check out the blog posts (and three, four, five, six) too
- Cinder, Instagram’s performance-oriented fork of CPython—try it out on trycinder.com (which I built!)
- Skybison (fork of original), Instagram’s performance-oriented greenfield implementation of Python
- shru.gg, a website built just so I could stop finding, copying, and pasting that shrug emoji. If you like it, you are welcome to help keep it running
and some older projects.
I like making things just for fun.
I like teaching.
- I taught CS 4973: ISDT (2024) at Northeastern
- I taught CS 50ISDT (2021) with Tom Hebb at Tufts
- I taught EXP 57 (2018) with Yuki Zaninovich at Tufts
Tom and I wrote Introduction to Software Development Tooling (ISDT) originally for Tufts (as CS 50 ISDT), and then made some modifications to teach it at Northeastern (as CS 4973 ISDT).
Yuki and I wrote EXP 57: Tech Trends and Careers for the Experimental College at Tufts University to teach students about personal and professional development. In 2021, we taught a much-condensed version of it as a multi-day workshop at Tufts.
- I TAed CS 4530 at Northeastern (Fall 2023)
- I TAed CS 11 (intro), 15 (data structures), 40 (machine structure), and Concurrent Programming at Tufts and was the head TA for 11 and 15
I also worked at the Center for Education Research at Stanford (CERAS) in 2014 and taught robotics at a summer camp some time between 2013 and 2018.
I enjoy working on open source projects.
Most of my personal software is open source. My work projects include:
Fun fact: I have now contributed to five different Python runtimes (Skybison, Cinder, CPython, PyPy, and Pyjion).
I like writing.
I have a blog and now I also have some academic papers!
- Partial Evaluation, Whole-Program Compilation (preprint; do not distribute)
Chris Fallin, Maxwell Bernstein
[PDF] [ARX] - Dr Wenowdis: Specializing dynamic language C extensions using type information (2024)
Maxwell Bernstein, CF Bolz-Tereick
in PLDI SOAP 2024
[PDF] [DOI] [ARX]
I will happily talk in front of people.
- Invited guest lecture for Dartmouth CS 59 on dynamic language runtimes at scale, November 2024
- Dr Wenowdis: Specializing dynamic language C extensions using type information (PDF) at PLDI SOAP 2024
- Compiling ML models (PDF) at NEU Software Day 2023
- Cinder: We didn’t start the fire (PDF) at ECOOP 2022 (invited talk)
- How Git works at Tufts PolyHack 2019
I have some fun facts.
- I adopted the Person Biking emoji 🚴.
- I once biked across Germany (Tübingen to Puttgarden).
- I walked the entire Walking City Trail in one day. It took 10 hours of moving time and 2 hours of eating time.
- I used to sell bread on the Internet.
or offline: 
