Hamish Knight
United Kingdom
Summary
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Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolHamish Knight is a software developer with a decade of experience primarily working in Swift, Objective-C, Java, and C, and a background in Computer Science from the University of Bath. He contributes to core Swift projects—working on the compiler’s SIL profiler, coverage map generation, and SwiftSyntax support for regex literals—demonstrating deep compiler and language-tooling expertise beyond typical app development. In addition to answering programming questions on Stack Overflow, he ships games on the App Store, blending systems-level engineering with consumer-facing product experience. Based in the UK, he favors code modernization and parsing/refactoring work that improves reliability and long-term maintainability. Colleagues can expect a pragmatic engineer comfortable moving between low-level language internals and polished mobile experiences.
10 years of coding experience
Computer Science BSc, Computer Science BSc at University of BathSevenoaks School
Stackoverflow
79,633reputation
2.3mreached
630answers
20questions
encoding
top-5%
string-interpolation
top-5%
animation
top-5%
weak-references
top-1%
dictionary
top-5%
sorting
top-1%
Github Skills (45)
json10
ios10
parser10
weak-references10
abstract-syntax-tree10
keyword10
xcode10
regular-expression10
compiler-design10
parsing10
intermediate-language10
parse10
coregraphics10
generics10
swift10
Programming languages (7)
Github contributions (5)
swiftlang/swift
Jun 2022 - Jan 2023
The Swift Programming Language
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:1038 reviews, 198 commits, 1506 PRs in 7 months
Contributions summary:Hamish's contributions focused on the Swift programming language, and included code changes related to the Swift language itself, specifically the SIL (Swift Intermediate Language) profiler. They improved the code generation of coverage maps, and made changes to the AST (Abstract Syntax Tree) to improve its performance and reliability. The commits also involved refactoring the parsing of various code constructs in Swift.
swift-programmingswift-programming-languageprogramming-languageswift
swiftlang/swift-syntax
Dec 2021 - Oct 2022
A set of Swift libraries for parsing, inspecting, generating, and transforming Swift source code.
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:109 reviews, 15 commits, 60 PRs in 10 months
Contributions summary:Hamish's contributions focused on updating and extending the SwiftSyntax library, particularly concerning the implementation of regular expression literals. This involved modifying the `TokenKind` enum, adding new syntax nodes for regex literals, and updating syntax rewriters and visitors. Furthermore, the user removed obsolete nodes, showcasing a focus on code modernization and cleanup within the Swift syntax parsing framework. The changes suggest a strong understanding of Swift's syntax structure and the underlying mechanisms of the Swift compiler.
bazelswiftbazel-rulesparsing
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