David Corbett
Staff Software Engineer at Babel Street
Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolDavid Corbett is a Staff Software Engineer in Cambridge, MA with 13 years of experience building robust back-end systems, compilers, and tooling. He brings deep practical expertise in text processing, Unicode handling, and language tooling—evident from contributions to prominent open-source projects like HarfBuzz, Snowball, FontTools, and Scancode Toolkit. At BasisTech and now Babel Street he progressed from R&D and software engineering roles into staff-level responsibilities, consistently improving code quality, cross-platform compatibility, and test coverage. His open-source work spans niche but foundational areas (minimal language examples, stemmers, font engines), showing a taste for subtle correctness issues such as encoding, integer limits, and lexer distinctions. Colleagues rely on him for careful, low-level fixes that prevent subtle bugs in text and font pipelines while enabling higher-level product features.
13 years of coding experience
9 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor of Science (BS), Computer Science, Bachelor of Science (BS), Computer Science at Northeastern University
French
Stackoverflow
39reputation
61reached
0answers
1question
Github Skills (41)
programming-language10
opentype10
c-language10
fonts10
batching10
lexer10
python10
scripting10
compiler-development10
testing10
fortran10
filetype10
fonttools10
c-programming10
java10
Programming languages (29)
Github contributions (5)
snowballstem/snowball
Nov 2015 - Oct 2018
Snowball compiler and stemming algorithms
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:4 reviews, 7 commits, 12 PRs in 2 years 11 months
Contributions summary:David primarily contributed to improving the Java code generation and ensuring UTF-8 encoding is consistently used for I/O operations. They also made changes to fix integer limits and parenthesize expressions involving the `as` binary operator within the compiler. Furthermore, the user optimized the Rust code generation, specifically importing `snowball::Among` only when needed. These changes indicate a focus on code quality and cross-platform compatibility.
compiler
harfbuzz/harfbuzz
Oct 2017 - Dec 2022
HarfBuzz text shaping engine
Role in this project:Back-end & Build Engineer
Back-end & Build EngineerContributions:35 reviews, 186 commits, 140 PRs in 5 years 2 months
Contributions summary:David primarily contributed to enhancing the functionality of the HarfBuzz text shaping engine. Their commits involved bug fixes related to code point iteration in Python and improvements to the handling of unicode characters, which included adjusting the handling of combining characters. The user also made changes to shell scripts related to testing and building the project, including an update to the directory layout and a fix for Travis builds on macOS.
harfbuzzopentypefontsc-plus-plusc
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