Programming languages researcher, engineer, and educator currently working on Haskell and GHC at Tweag. Her background is primarily in software engineering, but she is also an expert in algebraic effect systems and hygienic macros. She currently lives in Chicago. Alexis has been excited about programming since late elementary school, and her early frustrations led to an interest in programming language design and implementation when she was in high school. She began writing software professionally soon after, and though she has never attended university, she continued to explore her research interests in her free time. Eventually, she taught herself enough to start contributing to open-source programming language projects such as Racket and GHC.

Programming languages researcher, engineer, and educator currently working on Haskell and GHC at Tweag. Her background is primarily in software engineering, but she is also an expert in algebraic effect systems and hygienic macros. She currently lives in Chicago. Alexis has been excited about programming since late elementary school, and her early frustrations led to an interest in programming language design and implementation when she was in high school. She began writing software professionally soon after, and though she has never attended university, she continued to explore her research interests in her free time. Eventually, she taught herself enough to start contributing to open-source programming language projects such as Racket and GHC.

Given her engineering-oriented background, she particularly enjoys working at the intersection of theory and practice, and she likes building and extending systems to apply new ideas in useful ways. She’s also passionate about finding ways to make powerful but complex ideas more accessible, whether that means developing better tools or creating more educational resources. Her work of the former variety has led to an extensive list of GitHub projects, while her efforts towards the latter can be seen in her blog posts and conference talks.

In recent years, Alexis has taken a particular interest in algebraic effect systems, particularly in the context of Haskell. In her spare time, she has also enjoyed tinkering with a new system for typesetting mathematics a la LaTeX, but reimagined as a DSL embedded in a functional programming language. When not programming, she enjoys taking photographs on the streets of Chicago, where she lives.