Sean Maher

I care deeply about learning, computer science and mathematics, and music (and just about anything else that is interesting in this world). I enjoy solving hard problems, doing meaningful stuff, learning new thought frameworks, and building things from the ground up.

Currently, I'm working at Google as a software engineer, working on the Chrome "Catan" team, where we do performance, battery, and memory optimization work throughout the entire Chrome codebase. We operate in a metric-guided, evidence-based, realistic, and holistic way. To get an idea of the work we do, here is a talk done by one of my close coworkers.

In 2022, I graduated from the University of Ottawa, where I completed a Joint Honours BSc in Computer Science and Mathematics, Magna Cum Laude.

In summer 2021, I worked as a SWE intern at Google on the Travel team, but more specifically, working on SBCL, a leading Common Lisp compiler. During my time there, I wrote sb-graph, a plugin to graph SBCL ir1. I also worked to improve SBCL's support for block compilation, fixing a few bugs and integrating it into Google's build system, Blaze.

In summer 2020, I worked as a SWE intern at Google, on the WebAssembly standards team. I spent most of my time contributing to SIMDe, which I integrated into emscripten to allow for ARM NEON emulation in WebAssembly. I also wrote a disassembler for radare2 which allows disassembly of Wasm SIMD instructions.

In summer 2019, I worked with the Bank of Canada in cyber security monitoring, where I helped engineer detections for various cyber attacks. I also wrote a program in Python to parse spam email in real time.

Recently (January 2021), I and my team of four others from my university (the fourth being Cédric Brisebois, whom I couldn't find online) were global finalists of the Collegiate Penetrating Testing Competition, after winning the Canadian regional final. We didn't place, but it was very fun and taught me a fair bit.

From 2019-2022, I also ran the uOttawa CS Club, and so organized and ran nigh singlehandedly many events, including a metaprogramming workshop about the internals of Python, a book club in which we studied Joe Armstrong's book "Programming Erlang" and writing distributed systems (in spring 2021), a book club in which we're reading the Rust Book (in spring 2022), and a weekly in-person Code && Coffee, where like-minded programmers of all stripes came to chat.

I've been serious about programming since about 2012 or so. My current interests are compilers, operating systems, large distributed systems, and graphics. My favourite languages are C and Common Lisp.

In abstract CS, I care about semantics, proofs, logic, and compilers.

Aside from programming, I enjoy singing classically. I'm currently singing with the Choeur Du Plateau. Previously, I sang with the Capital Chamber Choir. You can listen to a song here. In 2019, I went to Italy, where my previous choir and I competed in the 3rd Laurenzo de Medici Choral Festival. Previously, I've sang in China, Italy, Germany, Vatican City, and a few other European countries. I've performed at a few notable locations, including St. Marc's Cathedral in Venice, Italy, St Peter's Basilica in Vatican City, and the National Arts Center, in Ottawa, Canada.