Practical information

  • Benjamin Poulain
  • Nationality: Belgium
  • Email address: benjamin@webkit.org
  • LinkedIn profile

Professional experience

October 2011—present
Engineer at Apple

iOS WebKit & Web Tech Engineering.
2009—September 2011
Software engineer at Nokia Qt Development Frameworks

Work on the WebKit 2 port of Qt and Browser related development, mostly targeting the MeeGo mobile platform.

Developer on Webkit and the Qt port of Webkit: QtWebkit. Main focus on WebCore performance and Webkit integration with embedded platforms.

Improved Qt rendering performance by rewriting rendering primitives with SIMD (Neon and SSE).
2008—2009
Support engineer for Qt at Nokia Qt Development Frameworks

Help customers and opensource projects to make successful applications with Qt frameworks. It involved fixing bugs of Qt for Linux and Mac, finding solution for technical/architecture problems and working around Qt limitations.
2007—2008
Teaching assistant for programming classes of C and C++ at Polytechnic faculty of the ULB

Help students to learn C++ and to develop their labs projects.
2007
Teaching assistant for programming classes of Java at Université Libre de Bruxelles

Give crash course of Java for students of the Solvay business school.

Open source

WebKit

Changeset:

Main experience in rendering and mobile features.

WebKit reviewer since March 2011.

Qt

Changeset available on gitorious.

Mainly work on rendering performance of the CPU rasterizer (raster engine).

Rekonq

Reduced the impact of the AdBlock engine on loading performance and memory usage. Added special case some common patterns that could be done faster than regular expression.

Personal projects

LinuxCertif.com

Website dedicated to Linux certifications (in French). It was developed in 2007—2008 when I was a student at ULB and was studying for the LPI certifications on my spare time.

The site had some success mainly due to the section providing all unix manpages. It still has around 2000 visits per day, which is why it is kept online.

Technologies: Python, Django, PostgreSQL, memcached.

lingua.ikipou.com

Website dedicated to language learning (in English and French). It was started in the summer 2008 and progresively improved the concept.

The main interest in developing the site is the kind of problems occuring in language representation and (human) learning. Performance is also an interesting issue since the data representation does not fit well with SQL.

Technologies: Python, Django, PostgreSQL, ffmpeg, memcached.

Education

2005—2008
Master degree in Engineering and Applied Science Université Libre de Bruxelles (ULB)

Specialization: computer science.
2008
Certification Linux Professional Institute level 2 (LPIC-2)
2006
Certification Linux Professional Institute level 1 (LPIC-1)
2002—2005
Bachelor of engineering Faculté Polytechnique de Mons (FPMs)