Hi! My name is Maxime Chevalier-Boisvert and this is my personal website and blog. This blog is my creative outlet, where I write about personal projects, share opinion pieces, and occasionally post more personal reflections. As far back as I can remember, I've always been fascinated by technology and machines. I hold a PhD in compiler design, which is my main area of expertise, but I have a fairly wide range of interests. I've dabbled with many things over the years including 3D graphics, game engine design, music, sound synthesis, virtual machine design, programming language design, reinforcement learning, imitation learning, robotics, microcontrollers, and electronics.
Research and development is the kind of work I was born for. I thrive in an environment where creative thinking, exploration of new ideas and problem solving is possible. After my PhD, I briefly worked as part of the Apple GPU compiler team, where I gained experience with GPU architectures and LLVM internals. Following this, I joined the Montreal Institute for Learning Algorithms (Mila), an academic AI research institute where I worked on various reinforcement learning and deep learning research projects with Yoshua Bengio, Liam Paull, Doina Precup and many graduate students.
In 2020, I joined Shopify, where I started a team to build YJIT, a new JIT compiler for CRuby. YJIT is now the official CRuby JIT compiler and it has been deployed at Shopify, GitHub, Stripe, Discourse, lobste.rs, and mastodon.social. There's a pretty decent chance you've browsed a website that is powered by YJIT today.
In my spare time, I like to blog and work on various open-source projects among other things. You can find my open-source projects on GitHub and my publications on Google Scholar. If you want to reach out, you can contact me on x.com where my handle is @Love2Code, or via LinkedIn. You can also subscribe to this blog via the RSS feed.