Hey, Niki here. This is a bit unusual. My sabbatical is coming to an end, and I am looking for a new opportunity. Full-time or contract, startup or research, remote or Berlin, individual contributor, ideally—tight team, ambitious product. I am a software engineer first and foremost with 20+ years of experience. I work on technically challenging products, foundational technology, dev tools. I’ve been doing Clojure and web recently, but I'm also very excited to explore closer-to-the-metal programming. I have an eye for design, user interfaces, UX, DX. I would love to work with a team that takes interface quality seriously. Or to work with graphics! I am pretty sure I am good at explaining stuff, including what we are building, why, why this way, why is it important, etc. For example. The overarching theme is to understand computers deeply, and then use that to make better and simpler software. If you care about that too, we might be a great match! # Recent work Instant DB is a US startup building a modern Firebase. I worked on the sync algorithm, performance, DX. A summary of my commit log. Roam Research is an OG personal knowledge manager. I worked on database optimization and a plugin system. At JetBrains, I developed a new Skia renderer for Fleet and Jetpack Compose Desktop. I’ve built many open-source libraries, including a database, a GUI toolkit, a Clojure dev environment, a React wrapper, a well-known font... More recently, Clojure+ gives you a taste of my approach to DX, and Fast EDN—to performance. I maintain several active projects — AlleKinos.de, Grumpy Website, this site. If you want to dive deeper, here’s the usual stuff: Projects / Talks / LinkedIn / GitHub # Why this post? It’s an attempt to reach beyond my immediate network. I’ve been doing Clojure for a long time, and now want to explore. If you are working on a compiler, a database, an IDE, a programming language or another technically ambitious product, touching graphics, typography, algorithms, low-level programming, and you think my experience can help, let’s talk: niki@tonsky.me.

I love community projects that accept submissions - I just finished reading ‘The Trial’ by Franz Kafka courtesy of Project Gutenberg and right at the end there was this line The gentlemen nodded, one of them indicated the other with the top hand now in his hand. which didn’t read right to me (top hand?). The men are introduced as wearing top hats; surely that’s what is supposed to be there.

You may be familiar with the idea of linting for code, e.g. via {lintr} in R which “checks for adherence to a given style, identifying syntax errors and possible semantic issues.” It’s super helpful both for ensuring that your code meets your standards, but also when working in a team; no more arguing over nits in PRs about code style — it can be checked against your style guide rules automatically and enforced with tools like {styler}.

You may be familiar with the idea of linting for code, e.g. via {lintr} in R which “checks for adherence to a given style, identifying syntax errors and possible semantic issues.” It’s super helpful both for ensuring that your code meets your standards, but also when working in a team; no more arguing over nits in PRs about code style — it can be checked against your style guide rules automatically and enforced with tools like {styler}.

Some years ago I came across an issue in the Frames repo that mentioned a blog post titled “Why pandas feels clunky when coming from R.” The article showed a side-by-side of simple data exploration in R and compared the code to Pandas. At the time, the author concluded that Pandas was “clunkier” than R. The author operationalises the definition of clunkiness but I think it’s really more of a you-know-it-when-you-see-it thing. You can feel if an API is making you drift further away from your task and making you think more about the tool and its idiosyncracies.

I’ve been learning Haskell for a few years now and I am really liking a lot of the features, not least the strong typing and functional approach. I thought it was lacking some of the things I missed from R until I found the dataHaskell project. In this post I’ll demonstrate some of the features and explain why I think it makes for a good (great?) data science language.

I’ve been learning Haskell for a few years now and I am really liking a lot of the features, not least the strong typing and functional approach. I thought it was lacking some of the things I missed from R until I found the dataHaskell project. In this post I’ll demonstrate some of the features and explain why I think it makes for a good (great?) data science language.