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.

Looking at the first principles of icon design—and how Apple failed to apply all of them in macOS Tahoe

Applying human ergonomics and design principles to syntax highlighting

Lockfiles are an absolutely unnecessary concept that complicates things without a good reason. Dependency managers can and are working without it just the same.