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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.

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) 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 would have to 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.

Sometimes I contribute to open source projects.

• PyPy (!848, !858)
• Cinder
• Skybison (fork of original)
• YJIT (#58, #59), which now lives in upstream Ruby
• CPython (bpo-36929, bpo-38648, bpo-42065, bpo-42199, faster-cpython #546)
• Pyre (Refactor protocol inference)
• Clang (rC345558)
• Reason

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]
• Dr Wenowdis: Specializing dynamic language C extensions using type information (2024)
  Maxwell Bernstein, CF Bolz-Tereick
  in PLDI SOAP 2024
  [PDF] [DOI]

I will happily talk in front of people.

• 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.