Tom Hebb
Software Engineer at Meta
Canada
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolTom Hebb is a software engineer with 14 years of experience specializing in security, low-level programming, and embedded systems. Currently at Meta, he blends production-grade backend engineering with deep expertise in reverse engineering and filesystem and hardware-level tooling. His open-source contributions span high-profile projects like OpenBMC, the Sway compositor, and btrfs userspace tools, where he’s fixed critical bugs, refactored complex logic, and improved stability and observability. Tom’s background includes latency-sensitive C systems work and teaching systems programming, giving him both practical performance optimization skills and the ability to explain tricky concepts. He’s comfortable across the stack—from kernel-adjacent tooling and USB/sysfs interrogation to Wayland UI styling—often favoring pragmatic refactors that simplify long-lived code. Based in Canada, he remains intermittently active in open source, bringing a security-minded, low-level perspective to production systems.
14 years of coding experience
Bachelor’s Degree, Computer Science, Bachelor’s Degree, Computer Science at Tufts UniversityComputer Science, Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University
Stackoverflow
1,101reputation
75kreached
6answers
0questions
Github Skills (56)
bootloader10
filesystem10
composition10
btrfs10
scripting10
r10
css10
linux10
usb10
c1110
ws10
power-management10
c1710
script10
gtk10
Programming languages (25)
Github contributions (5)
swaywm/sway
Apr 2020 - Feb 2022
i3-compatible Wayland compositor
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:8 commits, 8 PRs, 11 comments in 1 year 10 months
Contributions summary:Tom focused on improving the core functionality and stability of the sway compositor. They addressed critical bugs, such as fixing text color issues and resolving crashes related to Wayland interactions. Furthermore, they enhanced the information provided by the compositor by adding view shell information to the JSON description. The user's contributions also involved refactoring and utilizing new wlroots API for keyboard and pointer focus management.
waylandcompositor
gregkh/usbutils
Aug 2020 - Apr 2021
USB utilities for Linux, including lsusb
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:5 commits, 2 PRs, 1 comment in 7 months
Contributions summary:Tom's contributions primarily involve enhancing the `lsusb` utility. They refactored and improved how device information, including vendor, product, and serial numbers, is obtained. The user addressed a bug related to incorrect data retrieval for devices connected behind a hub by updating the method used to obtain the device's path in the system. These changes focus on reading USB properties from the sysfs file system and ensuring accurate device identification.
linuxlsusbusb
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