I am Behdad Esfahbod (Persian: بهداد اسفهبد), a Software Engineer consultant,
Free & Open Source Software
enthusiast, and the author of HarfBuzz,
a text shaping engine used across major operating systems, browsers, and apps worldwide.
I was born and raised in Sari, Mazandaran, Iran, and moved to Toronto, Canada in 2003.
Since then, I have lived in Menlo Park, CA and Seattle, WA, before moving to Edmonton, Canada.
I have been a Software Engineer at
Facebook (internationalization team in Seattle),
a Senior Staff Software Engineer at Google
leading fonts and text rendering, part of
Red Hat’s desktop team in Toronto,
and worked at FarsiWeb
in Tehran, Iran.
My long-term goal since the late 1990s has been to make Persian work great in computer software,
particularly in
Free & Open Source Software.
Since mid 2000s my focus extended beyond Persian and to international text rendering in general.
While not coding, I am interested in food, travel, photography, film-making, writing,
leathercraft, mental health, psychonautics, and non-traditional relationship structures.
In 2020 on a family visit to Iran, I was arrested, detained, and interrogated by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) for a week. I was released on bail under the condition that I would spy on Iranian activists abroad for them. I left Iran and made this public later that year. This caused me a full mental breakdown, which I have been recovering from since. I have written that account in detail here.
