Who is zOlive ?

My name is Olivier Chafik, I’m passionate with cool tech (interoperability, high performance, meta-programming) and ambitious UX projects.

Find me on GitHub (ochafik@), Mastodon (@ochafik@fosstodon.org for Open-Source and @ochafik@mstdn.social for Social), LinkedIn (ochafik) and Twitter (@ochafik, only if you Musk)

I’ve got a Diplôme d’Ingénieur from École Centrale Paris (equiv. MSc.) and have worked as a Software Engineer for ~ 10 years:

• Since mid-2012: Google (London): YouTube for iOS, Swiffy, AdSense

  (Objective-C, JavaScript / ActionScript, Java / GWT, Dart)

• 6 months at Deutsche Bank, working on a financial valuation service system and its computation grids

  (Spring, Netty…)

• A year co-creating a startup, incubated at Advancia & NeuillyLab in Paris;

  Our team ended up splitting, but the project was great!

  (Scala, Vaadin, Logistics Simulations…)

• 3 years leading a front office development team at Sophis (now Misys) in Paris:

  (C++ / C#, Oracle, Team Management and Usability focus)

• 2 years doing 3D graphics at Cimmetry Systems in Montréal:

  (C++, OpenGL, Performance Optimization)

I’m also a prolific open-source developer, lucky enough to have attracted active contributors to some of my projects:

• ScalaCL^ALPHA: runs Scala on graphic cards (GPU-backed collections + AST voodoo)
• Scalaxy: various macro-based experiments
  • Scalaxy/Streams: loop fusion / optimizations

  • Scalaxy/Reified: practicable composable reified trees

    (leverages pseudo generics from Scalaxy/Generic)

  • Many more (JSON interpolation, JavaFX DSL…)
• JavaCL: oldest OpenCL bindings for Java (popular within academia)
• BridJ: modern C / C++ interoperability library for Java (dynamic bindings)
• JNAerator: native bindings generator that parses C / C++ / Objective-C headers to create JNA, Rococoa, BridJ or Node.js bindings

Here are some talks I’ve given about them:

• Better, Faster, Stronger with macros & compiler plugins (Nest Labs 2015)
• Scalaxy/Streams: Faster collections, now! (scala.io 2014, Paris)
• Practical reified trees (not only) for GPGPU (scala.io 2013, Paris)
• JavaCL / ScalaCL (Devoxx France 2012)
• ScalaCL (Scalathon 2011, Philadelphia)

I was also lucky to review Matthew Scarpino’s OpenCL in Action book (Manning Publications), which features a full chapter on JavaCL!

I’m always open to new challenges: come and challenge me!