Behdad Esfahbod

Behdad is an Iranian who grew up loving programming and typography. In high school, he was introduced to data structures and algorithms, and after a couple years of studying these concepts, he ended up pursuing a computer engineering BSc program at Sharif University of Technology, Tehran. It was around this time when he found about the true way of Unix, as well as Free Software, GNU, and GNOME projects.

Nine years later, he's finished his MSc in computer science at the University of Toronto, and joined Red Hat in the Toronto office. He's become an expert in bidirectional scripts (like Arabic) and the Unicode standard, and would like to see Pango eventually used in a multilingual, internationalized, full-fledged print-quality desktop publishing system one day. He also dreams of a world where GNOME rocks on every desktop and laptop, and where he doesn't have to report bugs every other day.

Behdad's contributions to GNOME can be summarized as:

• Maintaining and developing text rendering, font, and Unicode related issues in the GTK+ stack
• Optimization in low-level libraries as well as login/boot performance analysis
• Non-coding contributions: Board matters, conference organization, etc

When not attending to GNOME, Behdad enjoys skiing, running, hiking, cycling, ice-skating, mount climbing, sometimes skydiving, as well as cooking, dining, drinking, hanging out with friends, and listening to really old music. He drinks his coffee dark and bitter and works towards his part-time MBA degree.

Contact:

• Homepage: http://behdad.org/

• Blog: http://mces.behdad.org/

• Photos: http://flickr.com/photos/behdad

• Email: mailto:behdad@gnome.org

• IRC nick: behdad

Working on:

• HarfBuzz (maintainer, developer)

• Pango (maintainer, developer)

• fontconfig (maintainer, developer)
• vte (co-maintainer, developer)

• FriBidi (maintainer, developer)

• preload (maintainer, developer)
• Evangelism

Previously worked on:

• cairo (co-maintainer)

• gnome-terminal (co-maintainer)

• Gucharmap (co-maintainer)

• GUADEC2009 (chair, programme committee)

• FoundationBoard (director since 2007, president/chairman since 2008, till June 2009)

• GUADEC2008 (chair, programme committee)

• GTK+/Hackfest2008 (organizer)

• HighlyOpenContest (admin, mentor)

• SummerOfCode2007 (admin)

• SummerOfCode2006 (admin, mentor)

• AccountsTeam (slave)

• Dasher (maintainer)

• GnomeGoals

On the map:

• 2011: Planning to be:

  • GUADEC / DesktopSummit / TextLayoutSummit, Berlin, Germany

• 2010:
  • GUADEC, The Hague, Netherlands (MISSED)
• 2009:
  • Libre Graphics Meeting, Montreal, Canada (First day only)
  • GUADEC, Gran Canaria, Spain
  • Internationalization and Unicode Conference, San Jose
  • FUDCon, Toronto, Canada

  • WebkitGTK+ Hackfest, A Coruña, Spain

• 2008:

  • Berlin GTK+ Hackfest, Berlin, Germany

  • LinuxFoundation Collaboration Summit, Austin, TX

  • LugRadio Live! USA, San Francisco, CA

  • Libre Graphics Meeting / Text Layout Summit, Wroclaw, Poland
  • GUADEC, Istanbul, Turkey
  • Firefox/Mozilla summit, Whistler, Canada

  • Cairo (Speck) Hackfest, Bolzano, Italy

  • Ontario Linux Fest, Toronto, Canada
  • Cairo Summit, Mountain View, California (virtual)
• 2007:
  • Libre Graphics Meeting, Montreal, Canada

  • aKademy / TextLayout Summit, Glasgow, UK

  • LugRadio Live!, Wolverhampton, UK

  • GUADEC, Birmingham, UK

  • OpenPrinting Summit, Montreal, Canada

  • Google Summer of Code Mentors' Summit, Mountain View, CA
  • GNOME Boston Summit, Boston, MA
  • Ontario Linux Fest, Toronto, Canada
  • Free and Open Source Software Symposium, Toronto, Canada

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