I'm employed on the Compilers team at Igalia. Igalia is a consultancy well known in a number of open source software communities, including Gnome, WebKit, Chromium (and v8), Rust, Servo, LLVM, the Linux kernel, and many others.
My work is primarily focused on implementing ECMAScript language features in the v8 and JavaScriptCore JavaScript engines.
I first became interested in work on compilers during my teens, reading textbooks relating to deterministic finite state machines as they pertain to parsers and regular expressions, and about the building blocks of a compiler. I would read GCC source code, and try to figure out how it all worked, putting together some toy compilers. Eventually, I applied this knowledge to creating some simple domain-specific scripting tools to assist with work at an earlier employer.
After studying at Seneca College, and particularly working through David Humphrey's Open Source Software courses, I became fascinated by the culture around OSS, and web browsers in particular. Ultimately, this also produced my interest in JavaScript, and I would cultivate this interest by becoming a core contributor to AngularJS, which caught my eye in part because of its expression parsing system. Ultimately, this led to my involvement in work on v8, where I finally gained the opportunity to hone my knowledge and understanding of compilers. This also introduced me to Andy Wingo, who does awesome work on a few other dynamic language compilers, and to Igalia as a whole.
Some notable things I've worked on (not an exhaustive list, and links to upstream patches are only small portions of the work that I've put into those features!):