About

Background

My name is Ayman Nadeem, and I’m a Senior Software Engineer at GitHub.

I’m currently focused on security, building infrastructure for abuse mitigation on the Platform Health team. This involves creating and scaling systems that detect and prevent malicious activity on GitHub, with a focus toward scanning and analyzing git content in repositories.

Before transitioning into security, I was helping build Semantic: an open-source library for parsing, analyzing, and comparing source code across languages. Semantic aims to power an improved developer experience, and requires a reliable mechanism for supporting new languages. To meet this need, I developed a library that uses Template Haskell and Generic meta-programming to auto-generate precise, strongly-typed ASTs. I was invited to speak about my team’s static analysis work at Facebook’s Big Code conference in 2019. I also served as a program committee member at PLDI 2020, reviewing academic papers for the MAPL track, a workshop aimed at applying machine learning research toward the advancement of programming languages.

My essay, Human-Centered Approach to Static-Analysis-Driven Developer Tools was published in the CACM and the ACM Queue Magazine’s static analysis issue.

Prior to that, I rewrote the GitHub notification system, shipped GitHub projects, developed APIs at Dropbox, lead product for classroom adoption strategy at Khan Academy, and collaborated with Microsoft Research to design early prototypes of Cortana, Microsoft’s voice assistant.

I earned my bachelor’s degree in Systems Design Engineering at the University of Waterloo, specializing in Intelligent Systems, focusing on robotics, autonomous navigation, image processing, and machine intelligence, and graduating as valedictorian.

I am currently completing my graduate studies in Computer Science at the University of Oxford.

I care about developer tools

I want to create technology that makes software engineering more systematic, accessible, and scalable. I believe that creating thoughtful developer tools is predicated on combining theoretical and technical rigor with an intimate awareness of native human intution. For this reason, I am deeply curious about a wide range of fields, within and beyond computer science, mathematics, psychology, and linguistics.

I am inspired by projects such as literate programming, Memex, Xanadu, TheBrain, and NLS.

Outside of work

I’m based in New York City, where I hunt for the best Kashmiri chai, draw cartoons, and rap-battle my cat, Mixtape.