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Vlad-Stefan Harbuz

About

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I live in Edinburgh and spend most of my time on programming and philosophy. I'm originally from Bucharest. I moved to Manchester to study, where I got a degree in computer science. After spending a little bit of time in Berlin, I managed to move to lovely Basel in Switzerland, where I ran a software company and studied computational biology. In 2022, I decided to shut down the company I had been running for 10 years and move back to the UK to research the philosophy of work and create open source software. You can more or less see this journey documented on the photos page.

I'm very interested in musical composition and linguistics, and I love cats, videogames as art, kindness, and those little cheesy mini pizzas you get at Coop in Switzerland.

I've been programming since I was 14, and I've written software for companies from small to large, including the University of Oxford, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the University of Copenhagen, the EPFL, Engie, the Swiss Post and the Romanian Government.

I work on open-source software:

  • I'm a core developer of the Hare programming language
  • I'm a regular contributor to SourceHut, which is the largest free-software hacker forge
  • I maintain the mpld3 library, one of the most popular Python packages on PyPI
  • I've contributed to Sciris, a scientific library used in one of the most widely adopted models of COVID-19 (Covasim, Kerr et al., 2021)
  • I have made smaller contributions to dozens of other projects

I also have extensive experience teaching programming, both in professional settings and online.

MScR Philosophy University of Edinburgh (2024)
MA Philosophy University College London (2023)
MSc Computational Biology and Bioinformatics ETH Zürich + Universität Basel (interrupted)
BSc Computer Science (First Class) University of Manchester (2016)
Edinburgh
UK
previously London
UK
previously Basel
CH
previously Berlin
DE
previously Manchester
UK
previously Bucharest
RO