Ngl i didn't know about Alyssa before now and this is coming from someone who enjoys reading about top dawgs in Computer Science generally. But after hearing about the Apple M1 GPU RE I spent the past two days reading up on lady Rosenzweig. Apparently she didn't start reverse engineering GPUs this year. It was back in 2017 when she was in highschool which later turned into a Collabora job working on Panfrost(the open Mesa driver for Mali(graphics processors designed by ARM)).
This specific Apple M1 GPU work commenced in Dec of 2020, despite the fact that there weren't any publicly available docs by Apple for their GPU ISA/command stream. Hector Martin(founder of Asahi Linux) kicked off the Asahi Linux project to port the Linux operating system directly to Apple's silicon(M1 and M2 series chips). She bought herself an M1 Mac mini as a 'christmas present' and commenced work on the GPU.
Typically, it used the same black-box method as Panfrost, idk much about these really but it's a black-box reverse-engineering technique used to build open source graphics drivers without access to official documentation or source code.
After a few weeks she could disassemble simple shaders.
Not long after she drew a triangle(drawing a triangle is the ultimate Proof of Concept in graphics engineering). You know what they say, "once you can draw a triangle, you can do anything."
Fast forward to 5 years later and we have conformant OpenGL 4.6, OpenGL ES 3.2, Vulkan 1.4,... Proton gaming works on M1 Mac running Linux(this is ridiculously insane btw).
She wrapped up the project this year and other efforts are now building on what she reverse-engineered.