Alex Clemmer obtained a BS in computer science from a middle-of-the-road state school in 2013. He had an ok-but-not-great GPA. 3 out of 5 officemates agree that Alex has programmed before.
Alex is mostly known for (1) turning Snapchat into a remote filesystem, (2) porting lisp to the Apple //e, (3) implementing Python 3 in a couple thousand lines of Haskell, and (4) organizing !!Con.
Alex is currently employed at Heptio (since January 2017). Previously he worked at Microsoft (from October 2013 to December 2016).
Snapchat FS —
[code]
I reverse engineered Snapchat's private API. Snapchat FS is a client I wrote (with some help from @pencilo) that allows you to use Snapchat to store and manage arbitrary files.
Turtles: turns Apple //e -> lisp machine —
[video,
writeup,
code]
Wrote code to send the assembled lisp interpreter binary from a laptop through the audio jack, to the Apple //e, which then stores the lisp and opens up a REPL.
pyli—Python 3 compiler in < 4000 lines of code —
[writeup,
code]
Writing parsers and lexers is really hard. I wondered if I could write a parser for almost all of Python that anyone could understand. As soon as I finish the AST-to-bytecode step, this will be a complete compiler, but for now it's "only" a parser and lexer.
Adding Haskell's where clause to OCaml —
[writeup,
code]
I love Haskell's where clause. It is one of the features I really missed when I started learning OCaml, and eventually it got so bad, I ended up just extending OCaml syntax to support it.
!!Con, founding co-organizer —
[Website]
More than 40% of our 27 speakers were women, and all speakers were chosen by a blind program committee. More than a third of attendees were women. Our entire ticket stock sold out in under 15 seconds. We obtained more than $15k in sponsorships. The talks were all amazing.