Max Heaton

Welcome

I'm a Part-time Undergraduate (PTUG) Software Developer at Arm, where I've contributed to open-source projects like Cranelift and ArmRAL. For more on my professional history and some of the work I've done, take a look at my experience. If you're interested in learning more about the PTUG program from one directly, please do feel free to get in touch! (Please be advised that any opinions I may express are my own and do not necessarily represent the views of my employer.)

Academically, I'm an undergraduate Computer Science student at the University of York. Some of my open-source personal projects are available below.

I prioritise efficiency and robustness in a technical solution, but I also believe that engineers have a social obligation to consider the potential impact or ramifications of their work; to this end, I endeavour to be mindful of how any of my work could be detrimental, even unintentionally. I'm also very supportive of work around diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) - both out of personal interests and owing to the potential benefits that engineering projects can gain from diversity of opinions and perspectives.

I hold a Student Membership with both the Institute of Engineering and Technology (IET) and British Computing Society (BCS).

Experience

Part-time Undergraduate (Open-Source Software)

Arm Limited (2021 - present):

Significantly improved opcode support for the Cranelift interpreter - especially for SIMD - providing benefit in testing for all architectures.
Ported many opcodes in the Cranelift AArch64 lowering backend from Rust to ISLE, accelerating the pace of this endeavour while improving some suboptimal existing lowerings in the process.
Improved performance of specific routines and implemented some new, desired ones in the Arm RAN Acceleration Library 23.07.
Contributed to libamath to improve performance, and implement additional variants of some routines utilising newer architectural features (such as SVE) for even better performance. Multiple improvements included in this work were upstreamed into Arm Optimized Routines.

Tooling used includes Git (GitHub / GitLab / Gerrit), ReviewBoard, Jenkins, and Ubuntu Linux for development. Primary languages for this work include Rust, C, and C++.

Open-source work on GitHub

Education

MEng Computer Science (with a year in industry)

University of York (2020 - present)

GCE Advanced Levels ('A Levels')

Cardinal Newman College (2018 - 2020):

Computer Science: A*
Mathematics: A*
Further Mathematics: A*
Physics: A*

Awarded the Reading List Foundation Scholarship after completion (nominated by all subjects).