Hi there,

I'm Simon, currently building Shelv: Hackable, Local, AI-enabled notes. It is source available here.

My CV is here

I have been fascinated with software since I was a kid, as it usually happens, it started with a game: Baldur's Gate. But what happens less frequently is I became a game developer and worked on two big titles for 7 years.

That affected me in several ways:

• At that time, you needed to build everything from scratch (this was before Unity), hence it was just normal to build a brand new physics engine or UI framework or network stack based on UDP => there are no impossible tasks, just hard ones.
• Performance is arguably the second most important thing in games (after gameplay) => I built a passion and appreciation for squeezing CPU and GPU cycles.
• I really enjoyed working on dev tools, virtual machines, and languages. Long story, but we slapped a VM into the game engine to run Flash on the GPU (I believe we were the first to run it on the GPU).
• 7 years of C++ leave scars on your soul.

Since then, I've worked in many different domains and different tech stacks, but performance and tools always called to me. The past 6 years I spent at various early-stage startups, none of which worked out well for me, so there is that.

• Implemented the JavaScript promise spec in an interpreter written in C# https://github.com/sebastienros/jint
• Co-started an optimizing JS compiler for Elm output https://github.com/mdgriffith/elm-optimize-level-2
• Implemented a pull-based virtual DOM reconciler in F# for a mobile UI framework with primarily stack allocations https://github.com/fabulous-dev/Fabulous

• DIY 34 keys split keyboard -> Forager and my travel case
• Editor -> Helix
• Terminal -> Alacritty with Zellij, I even wrote a plugin!
• MacOS stuff:
  • Launchers: Leaderkey and Raycast
  • Keyboard navigation: Homerow and mouseless