Brian Merchant
Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolBrian Merchant is a software engineer in Vancouver with 11 years of experience building simulations, game systems, and automation tools across Rust, Python, and web stacks. He has applied research-grade modeling to many-cell biological simulations at UBC, later reimplementing performance-critical code in Rust and leveraging JIT in Python. Brian contributes to GPU- and ECS-focused open-source projects such as vello and bevy_ecs_tilemap, adding GPU f16 support and animation/rendering features that show attention to both correctness and performance. He’s shipped production-facing web tooling too, creating a responsive SvelteKit character calculator that emphasizes interactivity and cross-device UX. Comfortable moving between low-level graphics, game engine systems, and full-stack web work, he often teaches himself new stacks from docs and examples to deliver end-to-end solutions. An understated strength is turning research code into maintainable, high-performance implementations that serve practical applications.
11 years of coding experience
9 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor's degree, Mathematics, Bachelor's degree, Mathematics at The University of British Columbia
Github Skills (11)
ec10
bevy10
gpu-programming10
vulkan10
rust10
entity-component-system10
shader10
tilemap10
compute-shader9
glsl9
animation9
Programming languages (19)
Github contributions (5)
StarArawn/bevy_ecs_tilemap
Jul 2022 - Jan 2023
A tilemap rendering crate for bevy which is more ECS friendly.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:61 reviews, 94 commits, 79 PRs in 5 months
Contributions summary:Brian extracted animation data from examples and implemented animation features. They set the time in the tilemap uniforms and made changes to rendering-related files. Furthermore, they addressed code review comments and updated the example files.
craterenderingtilemap
linebender/vello
Apr 2020 - Sep 2020
A GPU compute-centric 2D renderer.
Role in this project:Backend Developer
Backend DeveloperContributions:1 review, 8 commits, 8 PRs in 4 months
Contributions summary:Brian contributed to the `piet-gpu-derive/src/glsl.rs` file, implementing support for f16 data type within the GPU rendering pipeline. This involved handling specific considerations for f16 conversions and packing/unpacking operations, ensuring efficient data handling on the GPU. Further work includes adding validation layers and debug reporting within the `piet-gpu-hal/src/vulkan.rs` file. Finally, the user cleaned up related code in the `piet-gpu/src/lib.rs` file and updated shaders.
gpu
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