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 about bread, legumes, and compilers. Though my official title is Chief Potato, I work at Instagram as a software engineer. I’m also teaching CS 50 this fall at Tufts.

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:

• Cinder, Instagram’s performance-oriented fork of CPython
• Skybison, Instagram’s performance-oriented greenfield implementation of Python
• An in-progress Lisp to x86-64 compiler I am writing in C and writing about on my blog
• EXP 57, a course on professional and personal development that I taught at Tufts University with Yuki
• The term paper I wrote for COMP 117 IDS analyzing Dat and the Beaker browser
• Reason, a compiler front-end and toolchain for OCaml
• An automatically distributed programming language (2016) for my networks course, with the final writeup [PDF]
• The final project spec [PDF] and reference implementation (2016) and independent project spec [PDF] (2016) for the data structures course I TA’ed
• A distributed ray tracer (2015) that I made with friends for a concurrent programming course, with the final writeup [PDF]
• An unexpectedly popular virtual machine (2014) that got some Hacker News attention, along with its newer and much better designed cousin (2016)

I kind of maintain a blog.

It’s not very interesting just yet. Things are happening.

Sometimes I contribute to open source projects.

• Cinder
• Skybison
• Shopify’s Ruby fork (#58, #59)
• CPython (bpo-36929, bpo-38648, bpo-42065, bpo-42199)
• Pyre (Refactor protocol inference)
• Clang (rC345558)
• Reason