I'm very excited to announce that I've moved roles within Red Hat: I am now part of the OpenJDK team!

I've been interested in the theory and practise behind compilers, programming language design and the interaction of the two for a long time¹. Before my undergrad I was fascinated by the work of Wouter van Oortmerssen, who built lots of weird and wonderful experimental languages and systems². During my undergrad, dissatisfied with the available choice of topics for my third year, I petitioned the Computer Science Department at Durham University to revive an older module "Programming Language Design & Compiling". I'm eternally grateful to Dr. Paul Callaghan for being prepared to teach it to us³.

I've spent my time within Red Hat so far in "Cloud Enablement". Our mission was to figure out and develop the tools, techniques and best practises for preparing containerized versions of the Middleware product portfolio to run on OpenShift, Red Hat's enterprise container management platform. The team was always meant to be temporary, the end game being the product teams themselves taking responsibility for building the OpenShift containers for their products, which is where we are today. And so, myself and the other team members are dismantling the temporary infrastructure and moving on to other roles.

Within Cloud Enablement, one of my responsibilities was the creation of the Java Applications for OpenShift container image, which is effectively OpenJDK and integration scripts for OpenShift. I am going to continue maintaining and developing this image (or images) within the OpenJDK team.

Longer term I'm looking forward to getting my teeth into some of the technical work within OpenJDK: such as the JVM, architecture ports, garbage collectors or the JIT or AOT compilers within the runtime.

Earlier this year, I put together a private "bucket list" of things I wanted to achieve in the near-ish future. I recently stumbled across it, having not thought about it for a while, and I was pleasantly surprised to see I'd put on "compilers/lang design" as something to revisit. With my move to OpenJDK I can now consider that ticked off.

  1. I'm straying into this area a little bit with my PhD work (graph rewriting, term rewriting, etc.)
  2. one of which, WadC, I took over maintenance of, ten years ago
  3. Paul has recently had some of his writing published in the book Functional Programming: A PragPub Anthology