Behdad Esfahbod
Seyed Behdad Esfahbod MirHosseinZadeh Sarabi is an Iranian-Canadian software engineer and free software developer. He is best known for creating HarfBuzz. He was a software engineer at Facebook from February 2019 until July 1, 2020; before that he was a Senior Staff Software Engineer at Google since 2010, and before that at Red Hat.
Education
Esfahbod holds an MBA from the University of Toronto, Rotman School of Management and a Master of Science degree from the University of Toronto in Computer Science, and a Bachelor of Science degree from Sharif University in Computer Engineering, Software.While at high school Esfahbod won a silver in the 1999 International Olympiad in Informatics and then gold in 2000.
Notable projects
Esfahbod was among the founders of Sharif FarsiWeb Inc. which carried out internationalization and standardization projects related to open source and Persian language. He was a member of board of directors at GNOME Foundation from 2007 to 2010, serving as the president from 2008 to 2009.Esfahbod is an expert on font engineering and internationalization, a frequent speaker at workshops and conferences. He has contributed to many open-source projects. Among the projects he has led are the Cairo, fontconfig, HarfBuzz, and Pango libraries, which are standard parts of the GNOME desktop environment, the Google Chrome web browser, and the LibreOffice suite of programs. He received an O'Reilly Open Source Award in 2013 for his work on HarfBuzz.