Behdad Esfahbod
Behdad Esfahbod | |
|---|---|
| Born | Seyed Behdad Esfahbod MirHosseinZadeh Sarabi September 27, 1982 Sari, Iran |
| Occupation(s) | Software engineer, free software advocate |
| Years active | 1999–present |
| Known for | Developing HarfBuzz, contributions to Cairo, fontconfig, Pango; GNOME Foundation president |
Seyed Behdad Esfahbod MirHosseinZadeh Sarabi (; born September 27, 1982) is a software engineer and advocate of free software with Iranian-Canadian heritage, widely recognized for developing HarfBuzz. From February 2019 until July 2020, he was employed at Facebook; before that, he held the position of Senior Staff Software Engineer at Google starting in 2010, and earlier contributed to Red Hat.
Education
Esfahbod earned an MBA from the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto, along with a Master of Science in Computer Science from the same institution. He also holds a Bachelor of Science in Computer Engineering from Sharif University. His achievements include winning silver and gold medals at the 1999 and 2000 editions of the International Olympiad in Informatics, respectively.
Notable projects
As a co-founder of Sharif FarsiWeb Inc., Esfahbod concentrated on advancing internationalization and standardization within open source and Persian language technologies. He was a member of the GNOME Foundation board of directors between 2007 and 2010, serving as its president during 2008–2009.
Specializing in font engineering and internationalization, Esfahbod has spearheaded development efforts on significant open-source libraries such as Cairo, fontconfig, HarfBuzz, and Pango. These components are essential to platforms including the GNOME desktop environment, the Google Chrome browser, and the LibreOffice productivity suite. His contributions to HarfBuzz earned him an O'Reilly Open Source Award in 2013.
Detention in Iran
During a visit to Tehran in 2020, Esfahbod was detained by intelligence agents from the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps and confined in Evin prison for a week under solitary confinement and psychological duress. Authorities confiscated all personal data from his electronic devices before releasing him after he agreed to monitor his contacts located in the United States.
Personal life
He has one brother and one sister.[1] Esfahbod identifies as pansexual.[2]
External links
- ↑ Esfahbod. "The Esfahbods". esfahbod.info. Retrieved 2024-11-07.
- ↑ "Behdad Esfahbod - IMDb". IMDb. Retrieved 2024-11-07.
- 1982 births
- Living people
- Open source people
- Free software programmers
- GNOME developers
- People involved with Unicode
- Canadian engineers
- Iranian engineers
- Canadian people of Iranian descent
- People from Sari, Iran
- University of Toronto alumni
- Sharif University of Technology alumni
- Facebook employees
- Google employees
- Red Hat employees
- Iranian software developers
- Computer engineers