Boris Yakobowski

I'm a 27 year old PhD in computer science, former student of

• The MIM at ENS Lyon (now defunct, because of the LMD reform), from 2001 to 2004;
• The DEA Programmation (which has now been replaced by the MPRI), in 2003-2004;
• ENS Cachan, from 2003 to 2005;
• INRIA Rocquencourt, from 2004 to 2008.

As of this year (2009), I'm a post-doc at the PPS laboratory of University Paris 7. I'm developing the Ocsigen webserver, under the supervision of Vincent Balat. Previously, I was a PhD student on computer science in the Gallium (formerly Cristal) team at INRIA Rocquencourt, under the supervision of Didier Rémy.

My interests lie in the design of safer langages through more precise/expressive type systems, in formal proof, in compilation, and in web-related languages. More information on my work can be found in my research page.

The design of this website was initially inspired by the layout of some blogs I used to read. Throughout the years I incrementally rewrote the whole CSS, and it is now entirely of my own design. Unlike standard blogs, this site is static (the main reason being that the server which originally hosted it disallowed PHP).

The pages of the site are generated using around 800 lines of OCaml code. I use a modified version of XML Light to parse my XHTML templates files (the modifications provides various modes which deal more or less faithfully with whitespaces). Pretty-printing is done in a very ad hoc manner, in order to get readable XHTML. Interested people can try browsing the content of the src directory.

Formatting is done using CSS. The stylesheet fully complies to the norm. I use some CSS3 extensions to display translucent hovering boxes. However, some parts of the CSS are not rendered at all by Internet Explorer (prior to version 7.0), so this site is better looking under a standards-compliant browser (e.g. Firefox, Opera, Safari, Konqueror, ...).