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. I am currently a PhD student at Northeastern University working with Frank Tip and Jan Vitek.

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).