How Music and Optimization Led Alan de Freitas to Open Source

Alan de Freitas shares the story behind his shift from academia to full-time open-source development with the C++ Alliance.

From a childhood in rural Brazil, fascinated by how video games stored complex information, and inspired by a guitar-playing uncle, Alan found an early intuition that the symbolic, fast-math thinking behind music maps naturally onto computer science. That thread ran through a PhD exploring the intersection of music and optimization.

The turning point came during his optimization research: rewriting a search-space problem from Python into C++ cut processing time from minutes to half a second. That result led to the Matplot++ library and a stretch of nights spent building open source alongside a professorship, until joining the C++ Alliance changed the trajectory entirely, opening opportunities his academic role never could and freeing him to help others build their own libraries.