Alex is a self-taught Compiler Engineer from Canada who has been interested in Computer Science for most of his life, starting with his family's Windows 3.1 PC. It wasn't long before he developed a deep curiosity for how they work, starting from the Wikipedia page on logic gates. Eventually coming across C++ and finally feeling at home with a language that doesn't try to hide complexity away, he ignored everyone who told him not to worry about advanced topics or details of the standard and dove straight into metaprogramming.
After a decade of hobby work and serious study, he is now a contributor to GCC starting as the implementator for P0847R7 'deducing this', and employed at BayLibre working on adding OpenMP features to GCC as well as participating in the OpenMP ARB. He is also a member of WG21 and co-author of a few proposals, but that's just a hobby.
His interests include various aspects of language design such as verifiability, static analysis, and optimization. Writing maintainable, simple, and easy to understand code is important to him, with a focus on APIs that are hard or ideally impossible to use wrong, and provide good diagnostics when they are. Outside of programming he enjoys video games, especially competitive, and watching streams.
Catch Waffl3x in the following episode:
