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.

Modern computational biology depends heavily on open-source software tools, analysis pipelines, and containerized workflows developed and shared by the research community. While there is extensive gui...

sqlite-utils is my combined Python library and CLI tool for working with SQLite databases. It provides an extensive set of higher-level operations on top of Python’s default sqlite3 package, including …

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}.

Phylopic, NIH Bioart, Bioicons, Scidraw, Open Science Art, Health Icons, Servier Medical Art, Biodiversity Heritage Library, the Noun Project, Segment Anything, Excalidraw, draw.io, Biographics