David Wood
Principal Software Engineer at The Rust Programming Language
City of Edinburgh, Scotland, United Kingdom
Summary
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Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolDavid Wood is a Principal Software Engineer and Rust maintainer with 11 years of systems and compiler-focused engineering experience, currently leading Arm’s Rust team and co-leading the upstream Rust compiler team. He blends hands-on compiler work—improving diagnostics, auxiliary compilation, and platform support like Arm scalable vectors—with leadership that spans mentoring, roadmap planning, and representing industry stakeholders on the Rust Foundation board. His contributions range from refactoring production back-end systems (e.g., Zulip server settings and integrations) to stabilising build and linker configurations in rust-lang/rust, showing a rare mix of production backend and deep-language tooling expertise. Based in Edinburgh, he’s notable for driving community consensus and practical upstream change while still shipping code that improves both developer experience and platform performance.
11 years of coding experience
12 years of employment as a software developer
High School, High School at Vale of Leven AcademyNuffield Foundation Placement, Nuffield Foundation Placement at Glasgow Caledonian UniversityMSci, Software Engineering with Work Placement, MSci, Software Engineering with Work Placement at University of Glasgow
English
Stackoverflow
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Github Skills (17)
python10
django10
webhooks10
internals10
compiler-compiler10
compiler10
linting10
error-handling10
rust10
fluentd10
rustfmt9
database-design9
code-formatting9
javascript5
apache4
Programming languages (20)
Github contributions (5)
rust-lang/rust
Nov 2017 - Nov 2022
Empowering everyone to build reliable and efficient software.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:1583 reviews, 678 commits, 278 PRs in 5 years 1 month
Contributions summary:David primarily worked on the `rust-lang/rust` repository, focusing on compiler-related tasks. Their commits involved modifying the compiler's error reporting mechanisms, specifically translating subdiagnostics and integrating them with `DiagCtxt`. They also addressed auxiliary compilation in `compiletest` and stabilized the `relro-level` configuration option for the linker. The user's work appears focused on improving compiler functionality and test infrastructure.
crategarbage-collectionrustreliablecompiler
zulip/zulip
Apr 2019 - Jul 2020
Zulip server and web application. Open-source team chat that helps teams stay productive and focused.
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:15 commits, 13 PRs, 59 comments in 1 year 3 months
Contributions summary:David primarily focused on implementing and modifying Zulip server settings, specifically around stream invitation policies and create stream policies. They refactored the database model related to these settings and created tests to ensure the changes functioned correctly. The user also contributed to the Jira webhook integration by adding issue titles to the messages, as well as implementing a new Thinkst Canary integration and re-adding the Canarytoken integration.
pythonweb-applicationcollaborationzulipjavascript
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