Behdad Esfahbod

Photo: Behdad Esfahbod, 2018

2024-01-14: "Ruminate with Me: An update on my mental health".
2020-08-17: "If you read one thing from me, please be this".

My name is Behdad. It's roughly pronounced as [beh da:d] [es f@h bo:d] in IPA ASCII transcription. It is a Persian name, natively written as بهداد اسفهبد. I was born and grew up in Sari, Mazandaran, Iran; and moved to Toronto, Canada in 2003. Since then I lived in Menlo Park, CA and Seattle, WA, before moving to Edmonton, Canada.

Previously, I was a Software Engineer at the Facebook internationalization team in Seattle. Before that, Senior Staff Software Engineer at Google, leading fonts and text rendering, in Mountain View, Toronto, and Waterloo. Before that I was part of the Red Hat's desktop team, working from Toronto. And before I was at FarsiWeb in Tehran, Iran.

I am a Free Software enthusiast and developer, and previously worked on the GNOME Project. My long-term goal since late last century has been to make Persian work great in computer software, in particular, in Free Software, though these days my focus is not limited to Persian anymore.

I'm best known as the author of HarfBuzz, which makes it possible to read every language of the world on software like Android, Google Chrome, Linux desktop, OpenJDK, Microsoft Edge, Adobe products, and elsewhere.

More about me:

I wonder if you find what you are looking for here, so feel free to contact me. Contact information is at the end of this page.


Non-technical writings:


Whitepapers and presentations, mostly on fonts and text rendering:


Persian stuff:


Projects I mainly develop / maintain:


Projects I have developed / maintained in the past:


Friends and family on the web:


Contact:

Email me to behdad at behdad dot org.