Don Syme - Principal Researcher at GitHub

Don Syme

Principal Researcher at GitHub

United Kingdom

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Summary

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Rockstar

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Top School

Don Syme is a Principal Researcher and F# language designer with 25 years of experience advancing programming languages and tooling, currently at GitHub Next. He co-designed and implemented major .NET features (notably F#, generics, async, units of measure, and type providers) and drove language innovation during a long tenure at Microsoft Research. A prolific open-source contributor, he has hands-on impact across core projects like the F# compiler, MonoDevelop, FsAutoComplete, and ML.NET samples, often improving cross-platform builds, diagnostics and developer tooling. He blends deep research rigor with practical engineering—refactoring compilers, improving test suites and adding numerical ops to TorchSharp—so his work influences languages and ecosystems beyond F#, including LINQ/Rx and even ideas seen in Rust and TypeScript. With a PhD from Cambridge and an uncommon mix of compiler theory and production-grade tooling, he is as comfortable in core compiler internals as in front-end UX tweaks for developer sites.

25 years of coding experience

24 years of employment as a software developer

Australian National University

PhD, PhD at University of Cambridge

Github Skills (57)

unit-testing10

fscheck10

notebook10

pytorch10

nuget10

website-development10

multiplatform10

back-end-development10

mldotnet10

msbuild10

compiler-development10

testing10

css10

net10

nunit10

Programming languages (20)

C#PowerShellJavaCSSC++CF*TeX

Github contributions (5)

fsprojects/FSharp.Formatting

Jan 2014 - Nov 2022

F# tools for generating documentation (Markdown processor and F# code formatter)

Role in this project:

Back-end Developer

Contributions:43 reviews, 266 commits, 216 PRs in 8 years 11 months

Contributions summary:Don primarily contributed to improving the documentation generation tools for the F# Formatting project. Their work involved updating dependencies such as FCS, incorporating changes to allow simple bootstrapping and better diagnostics, and fixing issues with link translation, output, and styling. The user's contributions show a focus on refining the API documentation, ensuring better readability and completeness.

fsharpcode-formatterformattermarkdown-processormarkdown

fsharp/fsharp

Aug 2012 - Dec 2020

Please file issues or pull requests here: https://github.com/dotnet/fsharp

Role in this project:

Back-end Developer

Contributions:2125 commits, 329 PRs, 264 pushes in 8 years 5 months

Contributions summary:Don contributed to the F# compiler's codebase by merging pull requests that primarily involved refactoring code and making performance improvements. The commits show the user was involved in cleaning up and simplifying existing test code, with a focus on maintaining and improving the unit tests and integration testing of the compiler itself. Furthermore, the user worked on improving code diagnostics, ensuring the compiler generates more informative error messages and better stack traces.

dotnetfsharppull-requestscsharpdotnet-core

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