RÉSUMÉ
Behdad Esfahbod

October 14, 2014

Menlo Park, California
behdad@ behdad.org
http://behdad.org/

Education
2009–2012

Evening MBA, Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto

2003–2006

M.Sc. in Computer Science, University of Toronto

2000–2003

B.Sc. in Computer Engineering, Sharif University of TechnologyAwards
2013

O’Reilly Open Source Award, for developing HarfBuzz

2005

Google Summer of Code grant, for developing preload

2000

Gold Medal, 12th International Olympiad in Informatics (IOI’2000), China

1999

Silver Medal, 11th International Olympiad in Informatics (IOI’99), Turkey

Technical Skills
Internationalization and Localization
World expert in the OpenType text rendering, Unicode standard, internationalization in software systems, bidirectional
writing systems, Arabic and Indic writing systems, and Persian language.
Programming Languages
Wizard in C. Proficient in C++, Python, and bash. Familiar with Java and PHP.
Software Management
Expert in software development and maintenance using GNU autotools (autoconf, automake, libtool), git, SVN, CVS,and Bugzilla for Open Source libraries and applications.
Data Structures, Algorithms, and Graph Theory
Excellent theoretical and practical background, as demonstrated in IOI competitions.
Operating Systems and EnvironmentsExpert in GNU/Linux and UNIX development and tools. A decade of GNOME, GNU, and Fedora involvement.

Work Experience
2010–now

Google Canada. Staff Software Engineer.
Responsibilities included maintaining and improving of international text rendering across Google’s lineof products, including ChromeOS, Chrome Linux, and Android. In this position I designed, developed,tested, and integrated two libraries, HarfBuzz and GLyphy, into Google’s products to enable best-ofindustry internatiolized text rendering support.

2006–2010

Red Hat Canada. Software Engineer.
Responsibilities included improving, implementing new features, and maintaining packages in the Linux
Desktop in Red Hat Enterprise Linux product and the Fedora project, including addressing customer
problems, working with the Open Source community including various parts of the GNOME project,and handling internationalization (i18n) issues and coordinating with the i18n team.

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2000–2003

The FarsiWeb Project. Researcher and senior developer.
The FarsiWeb Project is a research project working on internationalization and Persian localization ofcomputer systems. As part of this project, I contributed patches to various software projects, including
Mozilla, Qt, KDE, Glib, Pango, Gtk+, fontconfig, glibc, and the Unicode standard, and co-edited two
Iranian national standards on adopting Unicode for Persian computing.

Summer–2003

Sharif FarsiWeb, Inc. Co-founder.
Sharif FarsiWeb, Inc. is a company specialized in distributing and supporting Sharif Linux, consulting
technical and legal issues of Free/Open Source Software, and standardizing Persian language issues in
information technology in Iran.

Volunteer Work Experience
2007–now

GNOME Foundation. Software maintainer and developer. Volunteer.
The GNOME Foundation is a non-profit organization that works to further the goal of the GNOME
project: to create a computing platform for use by the general public that is completely free software.
The GNOME Foundation Board of Directors administers the GNOME Foundation. I served as a director
for the 2007..2009 calendar years. I also served as the president of the Foundation from January 2008
to June 2009.

2002–now

The Unicode Consortium.
Contributing volunteer member of technical committee and bidirectional scripts subcommittee.

Software Development Projects
Mostly performed as volunteer unpaid work or as part of my job at the time.
2011–now

GLyphy Text Rasterizer. Designer and developer.
GLyphy is a revolutionary text rendering engine using OpenGL ES shader technology to render highquality text on the screen in realtime at every frame.

2006–now

HarfBuzz Shaping Engine. Maintainer and lead developer.
HarfBuzz is the only Free and Open Source OpenType text shaping engine used by Google Chrome,Android, Firefox, GNOME, KDE, and others.

2006–now

Cairo Graphics Library. Developer and Co-maintainer.
Cairo is a 2D graphics library with support for multiple output devices. Responsibilities include bug
fixing, making releases, general maintenance, and working with a community of contributors.

2005–now

Pango, Vte, Gucharmap, and Dasher. Developer and Co-maintainer.
All are part of the GNOME project. Pango is a powerful modular Unicode text rendering engine. Vteis a terminal emulation widget. Gucharmap is a Unicode character map application. Dasher is aninnovative predictive text input-method.

2005–2006

preload. Developer and maintainer.
preload is an adaptive readahead daemon for desktop systems. It predicts applications that users may
run and prefetches them from the disk for faster startup times. It was awarded a Google grant, anddeveloped for the Fedora Project. Base work for my Masters thesis.

2001–now

GNU FriBidi. Lead developer and maintainer.
FriBidi is an Open Source implementation of The Unicode Bidirectional Algorithm (UAX#9), used in
AbiWord word processor and Pango text rendering engine, as a requirement to support Arabic andHebrew scripts. FriBidi is part of the GNU project, by appointment of Richard Stallman.

2000–now

RiRa Persian Digital Library. Lead developer and maintainer.
RiRa is a huge database of Persian poetry available to public. Designed and implemented using PostgreSQL and PHP.

1998–now

FarsiTEX Project. Developer and technical manager.
FarsiTEX is a bilingual (Persian, English) typesetting system based on LATEX. Subject of my BSc. finalproject.

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