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 as a software engineer building faster language runtimes.

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—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
An Lisp to x86-64 compiler I wrote in C and accompanying blog posts
The term paper I wrote for COMP 117 IDS analyzing Dat and the Beaker browser
Reason, a compiler front-end and toolchain for OCaml
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]

I like making things just for fun.

I like teaching.

CS 50ISDT (2021), a course Tom and I wrote and taught at Tufts about software development tooling
EXP 57 (2018), a course Yuki and I wrote and taught at Tufts about personal and professional development

I kind of maintain a blog.

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

Sometimes I contribute to open source projects.

PyPy (!818)
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: this means I have now contributed to four different Python runtimes.

Talks

Cinder: We didn’t start the fire (PDF) at ECOOP 2022 (invited talk)
How Git works at Tufts PolyHack 2019

Fun facts

I adopted the Person Biking emoji 🚴.
I once biked across Germany (Tübingen to Puttgarden).